People have not been getting money offline really since the Department of Justice handed out initial indictments in April.
The messed up thing about this is they had a sustainable money-printing-machine that only became an unsustainable ponzi scheme due to the greed and corruption of the owners.
Affiliates and paying affiliates had nothing to do with their downfall. Affiliates are a standard throughout the online gaming industry.
Affiliates being a standard or not has nothing to do with it, anyhody that takes money out of the deposits will accellerate the process, and affiliates took a substantial portion.
Typically if you deposit $100 a large fraction of that is immediately paid out to the affiliate. You then enter the game and if the total rake on your account ends up being smaller than what is left in your account after the affiliate has been paid then you were a net loss to the company.
Without an affiliate that would be much harder to achieve.
That said, I believe that the players are stupid enough to play until they are bust so that's mostly theoretical, so I agree that they were quite possibly sustainable but it would need some inside figures to be sure.
Affiliates do not automatically get a chunk of deposits. Usually there are two options. They get paid a small lump sum for each new player, say $25-50. Or they get paid a % of the monthly generated rake (MGR) minus fees racked up by players.
I've survived for several years based on other players' willingness to play until they bust. But you can look at Las Vegas, Atlantic City, etc. for evidence of the sustainability of gaming.
Edit due to not being able to reply: The rake sucks a lot for everyone. It turns small winners into small losers, or keeps consistent winners from being huge winners. It makes it so everyone gets less play for their dollar.
I know Pokertableratings has done some [very incomplete] tracking on player losses, but they don't have a record of every hand played.
That's a small lump sum, but with a $100 initial deposit that's 25% to 50%. If that were the only deposit ever made and everybody asked for their money back after folding their first hand they'd be bankrupt immediately.
So the cumulative rake must be pretty high for that to work, unless the stickyness is huge and most people do multiple deposits.
Do you have any figures with respect to total rake vs payout over a sizable sample of deposits? That would be interesting.
They'll basically need to generate the $25-50 in rake before the affiliate can get the bonus.
See http://www.pokeraffiliatesolutions.com/full-tilt-affiliate-p... for more