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.
Yeah but they give you so little money compared to investors and shareholders. 😅
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.
You make money by both selling more and spending less.
Think about it, you can have none money left over at the end of the month by working extra hours at your job or by spending less money on something - but what if you can’t work extra hours because there’s none available? And what if you need that extra cash at the end of the month? The only thing you can do is spend less.
Phil is kind of saying the same thing you’re saying here, but it’s not easy to just “sell more”, not when everyone else is struggling to have that extra cash to spend.
The games industry right now, as a whole, isn’t growing. That means companies are selling less. Phil end everyone else would love to sell more, by all means if you’ve got some solid ideas on how to do that then every games industry veteran out there will happily listen to you, but the sad and shitty reality is that sales are down and when you’re a business, if you can’t increase sales you’ve got to cut costs.
And that means job losses. It fucking sucks and we can have debates all day long about the merits of capitalism and all that, but that’s the reality of today. That’s the game. Phil is being honest and up front here, it’s a shitty game but he’s playing it and if he wasn’t playing it, someone else would.
It’s not a contradiction at all. Yes CEOs are the main beneficiary of the system but they’re still accountable to shareholders who run on pure capitalism. There’s plenty of examples of CEOs trying to do the right thing only to get sued by the shareholders then kicked out of their jobs. Nothing about corporations inherently needs to be done in a capitalist way, except the fact that publicly traded companies are legally required by law to run as capitalistically as possible, and if you don’t accept Venture Capital or go public, good luck getting anywhere in this system.
Hell, basically the entire premise of syndicalism is to put workers in control of the workplace and let things naturally evolve from there. Once you remove the core pillar holding capitalism up, everything will fall down one by one like dominos. If you want to see a fraction of how that works just look at places with high unionization compared to ones without and it’s like a completely different world.
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.
Yeah, Gabe’s son is entirely focused on his own business, not related to gaming at all. Once Gabe is gone, his son will probably just sell it for an acceptable price and Steam will go public fairly soon after.
So Valve if Valve still made games?
That’s the thing, Valve is in this position because they have the Steam cash cow. Other video games company can’t do the same.
I just want a real Half-Life squeal. Not a vr tech demo.
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.
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?
Cry more rich boy, your tears are delicious.
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.
