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.
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.
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 genuinely believe he just wants to make cool and fun games.
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.
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.
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?
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.
lol the difference of course being that Phil Spencer is not living on the income of a standup comedian.
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
Do you exclusively play sports game [current year]?
Nope. Thank god there’s a free market and therefore I have options.
Profit isn’t the issue, it’s having to continually show outsized profit growth rates to keep shareholders happy that’s the problem. Look at private companies like Valve for comparison.
Exactly
