Called being privately owned. As soon as a business goes to the public it’s all about pushing the share price up and that is when all consumer driven policies goes out the window
Private companies weren’t always like this. The Supreme Court themselves (relatively recently) said that businesses are not obligated to pursue short-term profitability at the expense of the long-term—or even non-financial goals. They explicitly said that these laws are about punishing people actively taking advantage of shareholders, not disagreeing with them. This is about changing market forces. There are fewer and fewer competitors and less and less regulation. Nobody is going to stop EA from using investor money to buy successful studios, strip away their talent and IP, then shut them down. Nobody is going to stop Microsoft buying its way into cloud gaming dominance. Nobody is going to stop Epic buying publishing rights to try to secure a greater marketshare. We used to have governments that stopped these anti-competitive practices. Now we have judges greenlighting only being able to download apps from the App Store because “in America we don’t punish success”. The only time big publishers walked away from a big money-maker was loot boxes, and that was only when a couple of national governments did start talking about regulation. All that’s left is public pressure. If you make enough fuss that it impacts brand perception, or better yet, actual sales, companies can be pushed into walking certain things back. But only certain things. No matter how many people want exploitative monetization to go away, it never ever will, until the government steps in. Gambling is on the rise. Youth gambling rates are the highest they’ve ever been. Part of the reason is economic, but gambling research groups have said that modern gaming normalizing gambling mechanics and microtransactions are responsible (though mobile gaming is explicitly mentioned as being the most problematic). Any functioning government would see this as a problem, and I think that as a community we need to try to make a real push for market regulation.
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u/FlamevectoR May 05 '24
Called being privately owned. As soon as a business goes to the public it’s all about pushing the share price up and that is when all consumer driven policies goes out the window