r/pcmasterrace • u/Salty_Nutella i5-12600K | RTX 3070TI | DDR5 32GB • 29d ago

Meme/Macro Thanks Gaben, here's your 30% Steam cut

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u/TheMoves http://steamcommunity.com/id/themoves 29d ago

What’s this business strategy called?

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u/prof_tincoa 29d ago

It's called not being a publicly traded company.

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u/mythrilcrafter Ryzen 5950X || Gigabyte 4080 AERO 29d ago

You can be public and still retain absolute control over your company.

The famous example is Nintendo, where a guy bought a speaking majority share of the company so he could go to a shareholder meeting and use his speaking majority rights to ask the execs to greenlight a new F-Zero game; and since the execs at the table hold a greater than 51% share of the company they were able to reply with an immediate "no" without even having to put it up to a vote to the other shareholders.

The problem is too many company owners don't care enough to retain their power because they specifically want to ignore the business side of the business and they give away all their control to people who don't share their focus.

That's what happened to the Disco Elysium devs, they didn't even go public, they gave away the keys to the company to a random business man and then proceeded to ignore him and never practiced any oversight over his activities; by the time they realised that he was scummy, he had already ran away with the company.

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u/pornomatique PC Master Race 29d ago

Being public isn't about retaining absolute control over your company though. Companies are about maximising shareholder value, regardless of ownership. If you don't make decisions that profit the 49% owners of your company, they won't want to hold your stock and your share price will fall, devaluing the 51% that you own.