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This is the way. www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

This also applies to the rest of the software industry to be honest.

I feel like it could apply to any creative endeavour.

Maybe but I do find that the software industry is particularly bad. So many software companies focus more on extracting cash from their customer than adding value. I see more and more Dark UI patterns.

I agree, though I wonder to what extent I see that only because I’m deeply embedded within the software world. I do also appreciate that caring about things other than money is a luxury that lots of individuals, game studios, film companies, record labels, etc. do not have.

I don’t think the CEO of EA games has a second job cleaning toilets. Caring about things other than short term profits is not a luxury. It is a personal value. Otherwise how come larger companies are always much worse than startups ?

It is not even about caring about things other than money. It is about wether you care more about short term profits than your brand. Increasingly it seems like companies are optimising for things that are easy to measure.

Public companies and companies with investors grow this corrosive idea that their valuation or stock price is something they are obligated to maximise. It’s weird, people talk about fiduciary duty but I don’t think you go to jail if you don’t do it. You just lose perceived value.

I was talking to a friend recently about this. Milton Friedman writes an essay in the 70s saying the responsibility of a company is to increase its profits and that somehow becomes almost universally pushed to its absurd extreme. I read about Enron recently and it’s mind blowing.