IANAL, but the way this works, to my understanding, is basically that you turned a pile of money into an asset worth that pile of money, which in theory may slo

IANAL, but the way this works, to my understanding, is basically that you turned a pile of money into an asset worth that pile of money, which in theory may slowly lose value over time, so they can either pull more out of the pile of money to promote/release/etc it and then maybe that will make it back and then some, or they can just justify writing the value off to 0 instantly by saying it was worthless and wouldn't sell, and then they can eat some taxes that would have been assessed against some other profitable venture. So even if they released it for free with no ads tomorrow, it would not become worth $0 by doing that, even if they're not paying anything to release it, so they don't get the tax break, I think. In theory, them selling the thing for $1M when it's worth $70M on paper should be a $69M loss to write off, but it's possible the burden of proving the value pre-sale changes given that someone was willing to buy it for that little? Also ofc then you're paying taxes on that $1M sale or w/e, versus just the full writeoff.