I agree that it's entertaining and I see the appeal to role-players. It appeals to me, too (well, I'm a gamer). What I don't understand is how come someone's paying $10k a day to keep it running if it's not really returning anything. $10k is not a small sum. It sounds like a heck of a lot to pay to keep a game running just because people find it fun.

Basically, I don't think I've heard of anything like this before. Usually when people put something on the internet for free either it's very cheap for them, or they have a way to recoup the costs, e.g. by serving ads or asking for donations etc. To just throw money at something that doesn't return anything is very uncommon.