I think the real problem is businesses have to grow. If most big companies weren’t publicly traded then just being profitable would be enough.
Imagine making enough money to pay you and everyone else in your company a great wage one year, but it being bad because it wasn’t more profit than last year.
Infinite growth in an obviously finite world is such a moronic concept, yet the driving force of capitalism
I’ve seen companies phrase 8% growth as a negative because they missed their 10% growth target that they just pulled out of their own ass.
You know who will give you money? Customers if you stop treating them like piñatas.
Valve is an excellent example of a company that is privately owned, so they don’t have to satisfy shareholders with constant growth for growth’s sake. And yet they’re still growing and making a profit, because they make a good product.
Phil and Xbox don’t have that luxury because their masters sold out decades ago.
Valve is also a good example of platform monopoly. People need to stop treating valve like they aren’t also a big problem with the modern games industry. They are PC gaming’s landlord taking a 30% cut of every sale. You have to be smoking crack if you think that doesn’t hurt game developers.
Bullshit. That 30% cut pays for all the features that make steam a better store than any other store. Those features are all free for the gamers, because they are essentially paid by the devs in that cut.
If that cut wasn’t worth it, I don’t think Microsoft, ea and others would have come back to steam after trying to make their own stores (and failing).
How can it be a monopoly when I can just download another store with a click of a button? Which I have also done, and even bought games from those said other stores, but the experience was just completely miserable compared to steam, up to the point I’ve considered rebuying those games on Steam.
They are a monopoly because they’ve had the best product on the market consistently for 15 years. There used to be huge resistance to them and their drm from gamers, but they have shown over many years that they are trustworthy, unlike others that have tried this.
This is not an Apple or Google store situation where proper competition could not exist. They were always up against giants like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft or more recently Epic.
No they don’t, Steam barely ever gets updated, it’s not magically better than the others it’s just the one everyone uses.
Digital storefronts are natural monopolies. No one wants to use a different game launcher because it’s annoying to remember multiple passwords, to remember which game is where, to install and have multiple launchers running. None of that is Valve doing some amazing engineering that no one else has done, it’s just the natural state of game launcher / storefront economics. The only reason Steam is what people prefer is because it was the first one on the scene and has the lion share of users and games for sale.
We see the same thing happen with streaming platforms, the same thing happen with social networks. And Steam is also a social network which reinforces the monopoly. The other launches have friends and chat and shit but no one uses it because their friends are on steam or discord.
I don’t doubt that Steam being first to market is the biggest reason for their success, but you make it sound as if there’s some alternative store that is better for the consumer in some way. What’s the alternative? I have yet to see any other store/launcher come close to Steam in terms of features, even more so when it comes to Linux support, which Valve have turned into a viable gaming OS pretty much by themselves. In the end, even exclusivity and drastically lower fees for publishers didn’t make EGS the success that Tim Sweeney wishes it was and I think at that point being first to market can’t be the only explanation. They have to be doing something right.
They are PC gaming’s landlord taking a 30% cut of every sale. You have to be smoking crack if you think that doesn’t hurt game developers.
Which is the industry standard. Who’s the one who is smoking crack?
What percentage do you think they should be getting?
0
Damn I’m surprised you got up voted for that.
This isn’t reddit, people here don’t mindlessly kiss ass.
I get the feeling the part of capitalism Phil Spencer hates is the part where consumers can take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the product.
Phil Spencer, you have the luxury to quit if you don’t like the things you’re being forced to do for money.
Or, you could use your influence to try and push things in a different direction.
But Phil Spencer, you will do neither. You’ll shut up and keep dribbling.
I’m glad he can see the issue but then part way through the interview he loses it, and jumps to feeding the capitalist system
Comrade?
Nobody forced this guy to be a soulless capitalist. He chose his career path. Oh woe is you, Phil. Must be so hard for you. /s
I can see why that would be a bummer. In my mind, the perfect video game-ceo position would be for a company that makes enough profit to pay its employees well and self sustains the business to keep making more games. Having to constantly report a higher user base and profitability growth year after year on a global scale would be a total drag.
Steam is a prime example of this. Not privately run it would have been bloated to extinction years ago.
Shareholders are leechers to quality. Dividends are not enough, the underlying asset must grow no matter what.
When Gabe croaks it Steam is fucked. It will go public.
Do you have any idea at all how sus your username is?
Mine?
Yes, yours, bullshitter with two Nazi dogwhistles in your name and a new account.
Juice is a nickname I go by and I was born in 1988. Also yes, this is a new account, I started looking for a Reddit alternative when they started public trading last week. Where are the nazi symbols? I’m Mexican and Native American.
88 = Heil Hitler
Juice->Jews
88 = Heil Hitler
That’s one I’ve never heard before. Is it some sort of neonazi slang or am I just really dumb?
Well, looked it up before posting this comment. That’s absolutely crazy that it’s an actual thing.
I’m internet poisoned as hell but I’m surprised that that’s not common knowledge. Its also often 1488 with the 14 referring to the 14 words of the following neo-nazi slogans:
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”
“because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.”
It’s literally one of their most common dogwhistles and has been for as long as the Internet has existed, lol
If you see a 14 or a 88 anywhere in a username you need to start asking questions about intent.
Even if it was innocent, putting 88 in your username at best makes you unoriginal and old.
You’re half dead and you still can’t figure out a unique name that doesn’t give Nazis cover?
Pathetic.
You sound like the kind of person who would just assume Hindu temples were made by Nazis because they contained swastikas. Just because some assholes used a symbol as a dogwhistle doesn’t mean that the rest of the world should stop using it.
Well then I’m old and unoriginal Mr Dragon type. My screen name is what it is. I gave you an explanation that I didn’t owe you in the first place and this is all the effort that I’m willing to put in. Have fun being weirdly paranoid over usernames I guess.
step off the gas. nicknames and numbers can have entirely different cultural contexts.
for me, i’ve never seen “juice” used to refer to jews, nor “88” being used to refer to nazis, and i’ve been on the internet a long time.
when i see “juice”, the first thing i think of is the song by lizzo. “88” is used as a replacement for “bye bye” in cantonese lingo.
plenty of usernames are just random word + year of birth. stop overanalyzing it and chill.
what in the hell, lol. i think you’ve been on the Internet too much
my girl’s favorite number is 14, guess I gotta break the news to her that that means she’s a Nazi 😂
So just don’t take your video game company public.
One thing Ayn Rand’s characters were definitely too selfish to do was allow a committee to take over their work.
You can grow without being hostile and negative. Start your own studios, make innovative games, compete with quality not acquisitions.
you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth—because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow?
I thought the way it was supposed to work was, a company starts out investing in its growth and during this period shareholders get gains from the price of the stock going up, and then when it has maxed out just switch to shoveling the profits into dividends instead? If the industry has stopped growing, I don’t see why there isn’t a path to acknowledging that to investors, what am I missing?
Growth is more valuable than dividends, and there’s always more room for growth in the eyes of investors.
Growth is more valuable than dividends
Shouldn’t that depend on the dollar amounts? Why would $X of dividends be worse than $X of stock growth? And if growth just isn’t in the cards anymore, it would be in reality a worse bet as the companies pour resources into a black hole of false hope and self sabotage seeking something that isn’t actually going to happen.
You don’t pay tax on growth, you do on dividends. For large shareholders a high dividend can be a problem. Even for me, a very small time retail investor, I have to keep a balance of growth (like Apple) and dividend (I tend to use a dividend ETF so I can fairly reliably estimate my dividends) so I can avoid paying tax on the dividends.
I thought companies made money by selling a product to customers? Hmm, seems like there is some kind of contradiction here, perhaps Phil should look into that.
Investors don’t care about that anymore. Line must go up more and right now. If not, they will replace you with someone who promises to do that.
The best ways to raise stock prices include downsizing, jacking up prices, and cutting product quality to save cost. None of these are even remotely beneficial to the customers.
I actually can’t believe this is coming from a high level employee at a corporation.
Like we all know this is true, but isn’t it big to hear one of them talking about the insanity of the system.
It’s PR. Anti-capitalist sentiments score well in focus groups.
If nothing else, it keeps an anticapitalist narrative in the public discourse
A controlled anticapitalist discourse. This is no different than that Pepsi ad with the “protesters” sharing a Pepsi with the police.
I genuinely believe he just wants to make cool and fun games.
He’s had all the time, money, and resources to do that and hasn’t.
Oh yeah I’m sure the lack of a profit motive would just make games amazing 🙄
Great art was never created for its own sake /s.
And people never spend money on things based on how good they are /s
Things are often better when the people making them give a shit.
Do you exclusively play sports game [current year]?
Nope. Thank god there’s a free market and therefore I have options.
