Some thoguhts
About MAs profit and turnover.
Reading some articles ive found this: http://www.vlado.se/bridge/case/Mindark_PE_AB_EN.pdf .
As you can see, there has been created 450,000 accounts during the time the game has been around, currently there is 270,000 accounts, which of 90,000 are active. How much activity that defines an active account i can only make a guess on, and mine would be that its accounts thats logged into from time to time to avoid them from being locked due to “time out”. Dont remember that exact timespan but i wonder if its 3 or 6 months.
Also you can see that MAs prognosis is 11 million SEK profit for 2005.
And yes, if the deposit ratio get too low, the game WILL dry up as there is no fresh investements to redistribute. No input means no output and if thats redicilous, you need to take some math classes.
Obviously MA wont give out money that we dont deposit and at the current time, without the deposits, the rest of the income MA has wouldnt be able to sustain a viable ingame economy for very long and if loots get TOO bad it get too expencive to play and people quit. Of course, its also somewhat self regulating as most people will make small deposits if they run out of cash.. however, the richest ones in this game can gon on for a longass time without depositing as they have avatars thats worth 150k PED and more.. much more.
About peds and items bough with other payment methods.
If I send Kjetil 1000 USD and take over all his ingame assets, that doesnt affect the economy of PE in any direct way. MA still have the cash in the game and if i spend them or if Kjetil spend them doesnt really matter much to them. However it might have indirect affects if Kjetil had it all stashed on an inactive account and never actually used any of it. If i take it over, its obviously because i want to use it and the fact that its in use instead of “ideling” makes some difference, as I can either lose or gain on the investment.
Also beware, this is now NOT ALLOWED to do according to the EULA, probably because MA got fed up with stupid “i got scammed on PayPal” support cases that they cant really do anything with.
As to depositing.
Depositing into PE is in my opinion just what some other people mentioned, paying for entertainment. However this entertainment can provide you with some serious profit.
Me and 4 other friends have made well over 10,000 USD profit each wich kinda sets the standard for how many people that have to deposit 100 USD only to cover our profits.
Most of this profit is also already withdrawn from the game.
The irony of it all is that we have been playing for the fun of it and not for the purpose of making profit, now thats the REAL fun 
If im uber or not.. not my decision to make really nor do i actually care very much, but i guess most people that know me would consider me to be.
As to the working of PE
There is several ways of going about how to play PE in a cheapest possible way. The way me and my friends has been going is to play for fun and to get as much as possible out of PE in that regard.
Most of us, if not all also have interests that goes beyond roleplaying and also covers computers, software engineering, economy, math and how games work, this of course made us go deeper into PE than we would in a normal pay-to-play MMORPG and made us look for things you normally wont look for. Of course inflation also helps when you buy an item and use it for a year before selling it, however most of my profit i have had from hunting and mining “the right things, at the right place, at the right time”. I have also had some profit with crafting, but im not too much into that.
Unfortunately, Im currently on ISDN so im unable to be as active as I used to be, but when I do play, i still usually come out with profit unless i try “new things”.
A great fighter was once asked how he got so much better than his opponents. his answer was “I have made more mistakes and found out what doesnt work”.
If you can affford doing that, thats another approach.
rofl. but +reps anyways 
