Of course, I understand that lottery only pays out 50% to prizes so by playing you automatically lose 50 cents on the dollar ON AVERAGE. But, there is a difference between the return of a $12 mil jackpot and a $500 mil jackpot.
Yes, it is possible to have multiple winners. But I also mentioned that we have not account for the smaller prizes and I believe that it is more than offset the multiple winners scenario. Since the odds is so low, there haven’t been that many multiple winners with Mega Millions.
I am terrible with statistics and do not have the skills to compute the exact return but my gut feeling here is that currently there is positive return.