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I'd imagine another hole in the "charitable donation" problem is that you wouldn't even necessarily have to be giving the charity stuff they want. If Microsoft gave the Salvation Army 1,000,000 licenses for some obscure developer tool with a bad reputation (but nonetheless a list price of $100), the SA would be foolish to refuse it (somewhere, someone probably wants a few copies), but good luck writing it off as a $100M donation. I guess you could make some sort of calculation as to how much Microsoft lost in sales by doing thatbut that all sounds very speculative.
And even that mass-developer-tool sounds infinitely more defensible than giving 1,000,000 Shiny Lightning Axes to charity, even if you can demonstrate that your players routinely pay $10 for a Shiny Lightning Axe.
It's obvious these schemes shouldn't work, but it's an interesting question to ask precisely why. I mean, I can donate all kinds of ugly-ass and impractical household junk and write that off so long as the charity accepts it (they will refuse some things if they don't deem them worth the cost of storing them, which isn't an issue with virtual whatsits). Where does the line get drawn between that and my pile of Shiny Lightning Axes?
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