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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.

The last point you made there is also absolutely spot on. I’d extend it to say that they’re increasingly _only_ measuring the easiest things to measure.

Absolutely. I honestly believe that for many organisations, having more data leads to worse decision making. I have seen this personally so many times

I’ve grown increasingly skeptical, too. I spoke to a few people recently after posting that I don’t collect any analytics. Lots of suggestions about metrics I should care about, but not many people could convince me of concrete changes I could make to my content to improve it based on those metrics.

I honestly meet a lot of people (ever quite left leaning) who believe that the purpose of a company is ta make money. Which is a really depressing idea.

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.