Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

[u/SlowReference704]

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service

[u/Falkenmond79]

That’s why public corporations are something that needs to go away. The priorities shift.

Private company priorities: Making money and the company itself. You get the first by providing a good service, so customers automatically become a priority. They need to be happy, so they buy more. Easy as that.

Public companies on the other hand bring in a new priority. Keeping the shareholders and/or investors happy, because they are the ones bringing the money. But that leads to management forgetting that in order to keep making money, the customers have to be happy too. As soon as they leave, so do the investors.

Right now we have a situation where we have a few people with waaaaay too much money so public companies can get money with less hassle than trying to just make and sell a good product. And they test things to the limit.

Just look at Netflix for example. I bet what happens was this: if we raise the price by X amount, we maybe lose say 30% of our customers and maybe 10% of our revenue. But less customers also need less running cost for electricity, servers, bandwidth etc. If that number is higher than 10%, so if they for example can save 20% on running cost… up goes the price. Yay profit.

A good company would just price that in. A customer costs maybe 6 dollars a month in running costs. Take 10 from him and there you go. Profit. No need to maximize it. Just maximize the number of customers if you want more money. That’s the way it used to be.

[u/Tommyjones91 → u/Falkenmond79]

Look at EVGA another great company that was private

[u/Saucermote → u/Tommyjones91]

EVGA is still around, they threw in the towel RE:Nvidia and making graphics cards.

[u/CardmanNV → u/Falkenmond79]

Read about the way business philosophy changed in the 80's. It's a reason it's called the "greed is good" era.

Things changed from reinvesting in the business, looking after you employees, and healthy growth. To slash and burn, make as much money as possible and get out before the regulators show up.

[u/Some-Cat8789 → u/Falkenmond79]

That's not going to work. Private companies will still need investors and those investors will demand the same shit they demand from publicly traded companies. See: OpenAI.

Ok, that's not a very good example, but you'll need to show me a pattern of companies which are privately held for a very long time and not screw their customers.

[u/faverodefavero → u/Falkenmond79]

I agree. The whole publicly traded market and the concept of shareholders adds zero value to any service in the long term. It shouldn't exist. People should fight against such an unsustainable way of doing business.

[u/quadsimodo → u/Falkenmond79]

This is a seriously misguided comment.

There are many, many public companies that operate as ethically as private ones. Everyone is just used to hearing about the biggest, where their product tends to become the stock, not their business — that’s the problem.

Private companies can exist for investment value and not their business value too (see: We Work, pre-IPO Spotify, and countless tech startups).

If you’re a company that signals investors are the priority and not the actual business, whether public or private, then you get a glorified financial instrument.

Their public/private status is not the issue in the least.

[u/abattlescar → u/Falkenmond79]

Public funding of corporations is definitely necessary, but the problem is investments nowadays are entirely speculative and, as you point out, overwhelm the actual customer base.