Phil Spencer blames capitalism for being bad at his job
(www.pcgamer.com)
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This is an argument, and in my opinion a fallacy, they constantly perpetuate to call out capitalism. It's part of what's broken with the stock market too, and he's not wrong they will be unhappy with him along with driving his stock price way down if he doesn't present growth. The thing is, a continuous flow of steady profit, without growth, is still healthy capitalism (excluding adjusting the not-growth for rampant inflation). If you make a game that every year makes a $10M profit consistently every year, that should be celebrated as success. The commies just don't want to look at that because they only listed to wall street talking heads and speculators screaming for growth, growth, growth, as what is and only is capitalism.
Regarding Xbox though, can they even make consistently profiting games? The proportion of total gamers : those playing Microsoft games is what's really broken. How about just making some fun games without preaching a ridiculous message, and see where that gets you.
Infinite growth is a sort of ponzi-nomics that funnels stock cycles, and the bizarre idea that you can forecast your company's profits for the next 5 years with total accuracy. Everything in the market is based on this idea that it is predictable when every single person involved knows it is not. So when the unpredictable happens, suddenly the government gets called in to change reality to match their projections.
If we actually lived in a pure capitalist system, then Xbox Games That Has Never Shown a Profit wouldn't exist.
Oh, dear we are in the planned economy of the ccp, it was just hidden by a extra layer of words, haha
The problem is investment money.
Go back to the days of rolling past profits into future ventures.
Instead they have an addiction to VC cash. He's right about perpetual growth, because everybody is leveraged to hell and if you make money and turn a profit a new round of investors buy in and now you need to do better and bigger. It's not enough to tread water because you will just break even paying back the investment.
This didn't used to be a thing.
The industry practically operates on the premise of taking out a second mortgage so you can improve your house and then use the higher valuation to take out a third mortgage to pay back the second one, robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Every game now costs $600 million to make and has to sell $4 billion to pay everybody back, and then they need $800 million for the next game so they borrow it and need to sell $5 billion.
I think this also speaks to an emphasis on volume over quality. A good product will turn a profit, but the current trend is to try to make everything so big to conquer some theoretical market share. Get big, don't worry about whether or not your product is good or if your production cycle is sustainable, just get Amazon big or burn down the whole industry trying.
It's absurd.
Make a good product and you will make enough money to pay everyone and fund the next product. Repeat ad nauseam. You now have a thriving and successful company.
It is underappreciated in the mainstream how irregulated wall st is, just like health care, travel, banking, and any other despised industry of modern society. Capitalism would be letting stock markets decide if insider trading is permissible, not federal congress. Quarterly obsession is a combination of a forced framework and a century of abysmal financial policy.