Sony: we make so much money selling these games to a giant pc audience;
Also Sony: what if we restricted them geographically a huge amount and require them to go through extra steps so we can (???) which allows us to (??? + Harvest data)?
Just note that a PS account is required to access the MULTIPLAYER section of the game but as far as everyone is concerned singleplayer doesn’t require one.
It’s not shareholders specifically, but management that doesn’t give a shit about the company long term.
The business has a fiduciary duty to benefit the shareholders, but it doesn’t have to be short term only, or at the cost of long term benefits.
Most publicly traded companies end up with leadership who are only interested in justifying their employment through the next earnings call or making sure the stock price has gone up between when they last got options and when they next vest.
Valve does good not because they don’t have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don’t squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.
Valve does good not because they don’t have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don’t squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.
All of that short-term thinking is because of the stock market. All of their shareholders think of, day in and day out, is “line go up”.
Well, I’ll disagree a bit there. The largest stock investors are institutional investors managing funds on behalf of retirement plans. Those investors tend to prefer consistent long term growth over a narrow quarterly growth target, and will actually look at things beyond just stock price, like strategy and long term market prospects.
Short term thinking from the leadership team is them not having a good idea on how to provide the long term strategy that investors prefer, and instead hoping to appeal to the smaller group of investors who do only care about short term growth so they can secure their own payoff, potentially at the expense of the long term prospects of the company.
Valve is a corporation. They have shareholders other than Gabe, many of whom are not employed at valve of in their leadership team. Their leadership team isn’t looking to ensure that their paycheck comes in over the future of the company, so they make good choices.
Compare with companies like Coca-Cola, which are publicly traded but have that long term plan that lets them openly talk about sacrificing revenue to pursue product plans and market growth that leads to more stable long term profits.
The largest stock investors are institutional investors managing funds on behalf of retirement plans. Those investors tend to prefer consistent long term growth over a narrow quarterly growth target, and will actually look at things beyond just stock price, like strategy and long term market prospects.
Based on what evidence? They just make sure the line steadily goes up each quarter, instead of accounting for companies that invest potential profits into longer-term plans. If not, the 401K investor will either drop the stock, or put it in a higher-risk plan.
That sort of thinking is akin to corporate suicide when in a publicly-traded market, so they don’t do it.
A company like Valve isn’t publicly-traded, and they have a limited number of investors they can talk to about their plans. That and they have a reputation of quality products, so even the investors are going to put up with short-term drops in profitability for even more profits.
This is kind of true. But the leadership often answers to the board of directors, which have often been shareholders that buy into control of the company after it goes public. At this point, you have shareholders who own no personal stake in a company. Often their only goal is to make a profit, sometimes they’re “serial entrepreneurs” who make their millions getting on boards and “flipping” the company to make a huge profit in a short amount of time.
So it’s kind of management, but it’s also management brought on by the presence of public investment in a company.
Combine this with the fact that the law has come down more than once on the side of choosing options that make the company money over maintaining company policy and you get a really terrible culture of publicly traded companies gouging themselves for short term profit (or even long term profit done in a shitty way.)
Oh, I realize I repeated some of what you said. But you did say “it’s not about shareholders” to be contrarian, then went on to explain (like I did) how it’s actually exactly because of shareholders.
Edit: what the fuck I literally can’t comment on the comment below.
I wasn’t actually trying to be contrarian, but okay.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t explain how it’s actually shareholders, because the board of directors isn’t “the shareholders”, but leadership of the company.
Valve isn’t publicly traded, but it’s still a corporation with shareholders, a board of directors, and the usual trappings of corporate leadership. They tend to operate in a not shitty way because their leadership isn’t interested in sacrificing greater long term profit for lesser short term profits.
A private, family owned partnership style business can operate with a focus on short term profits over long term profits.
The safest way to ensure that the leadership of both of those businesses out as much money in their pockets as possible is to continuously maximize short term profits. “The shareholders” aren’t the cause for that mindset.
Valve support has historically been pretty awesome. They even replaced an index controller nearly a year out of warranty. Granted their controllers have a shit switch and they break after a few hundred hours, but good on support for being bros.
That’s basically all corporate entities. They’re not beholden to the workers, the consumers, or the general public and instead answer to people generally trying to milk everything as hard as possible.
Valve wouldn’t exist at it is if it was public and might not exist as it is if it wasn’t for Newell (and I say that as a person that’s very critical of Valve, they’re still very far from how bad they could be considering their position)
Not gonna defend corporations here, but valve isnt public. They are privately owned by the bosses and employees, valve has one of the lowest turnover rates in the industry. It is quite difficult to get a job there for that reason. So they are actually quite beholden to their workers.
I feel like GOG deserves at least some respect. They don’t have a perfect track record, by any means, but I find them at least reliable, decent sales, have gotten some fun freebies out of them in the past.
And, hey, shopping cart. Which shouldn’t be a selling point, I’m fucking flabbergasted that it came to this on any platform, but that’s another point above EPIC.
I don’t think they’re that dumb, I can see them making their own launcher with PS+ sub to get free games or something like gamepass, but locking online play behind a paywall on PC sounds too braindead even for them, it’d be an even worse PR suicide attempt than Epic’s exclusivity shenanigans.
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