this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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This is why capitalism ruins everything. So it's not even about making art that is profitable, it's about beating out other investment opportunities that someone could have chosen, even if it meant the art didn't get made.
That is so ass-backwards.
Investment should be about wanting to grow a company whose products you believe in, both to see returns when those products perform well, but also to enjoy the future products.
Someone whose attitude is "I don't care about your products at all, I just care about cash ROI" will turn around and short your stock and disparage you, if they think it'll net them more money. In other words, they won't actually look out for the best interests of the company, and will always be looking out for opportunities to plunder the business for more profit.
And this is supposed to create a healthy market for goods? Please.
"The free market makes goods compete to see what customers prefer." Apparently not.
Apparently it creates a situation where the products can be profitable and amazing and well-loved, but a bunch of wealthy assholes who don't care about the products at all can decide the company isn't up to their standards, and punish or kill it.
There was another post here on Beehaw about housing costs, where someone noted that "voting with your wallet" doesn't work because wealthy people can "out-vote" you, on a level that even collectively you can't compete with, and this really illustrates their point well.
Late edit:
I think it bears saying that under this model of ROI calculation, depending on how well other industries are doing, it is entirely possible that no video game could feasibly outperform the market for a given timeframe... so should the whole games industry just fucking shut down in that case?
This misses the point in so many ways, I'm not sure where to start... but here goes:
Except that that's the opposite of what happened here; their skills were wanted by many people, to the point of profitability and sustainability, but other people, who didn't care about the skills or how they were utilized, decided that whatever the product was, it wasn't good enough. Their skills were literally not part of the consideration here at all.
Except that's not what we're talking about either. Once again, this was not a situation where the actual demand for the product was not present due to media evolution, or product quality, or lack of consumer discretionary spending; the demand was present. The product was both in-demand and in fact profitable.
This was not flexibility, this was- again- the opposite of that; a rigid metric that did not consider anything beyond cash growth, despite the fact that products are the point of a company. Without products, the company will not generate any profit. Without companies generating profit, the market as a whole will not grow. Without market growth, there is no ability to invest elsewhere (or at least, at a level to measure against).
That's why this (and all the other hyper-growth-minded investment planning) is so short-sighted; sustainability ensures continued operation, which enables future profits. Demanding unsustainable growth ensures collapse, which precludes future profits. And eventually people who have been burned by this will start cutting investors out of the equation anyways, which also precludes profits (for investors).
The whole, "I could have put my money elsewhere in the market and made more" as a justification to demand unsustainable growth is also form of gaslighting by investors; as you note, if they knew where to put their money instead to make more, they would have done so. They invested in a given company because they hoped it would outperform other companies, and they should have to suffer that loss personally just as they would enjoy above-market profits personally. This is just another attempt at "socialized losses and personalized gains", by trying to make themselves out to have been engaging in something other than gambling (which is exactly what investing in a company whose products you don't care about is).
No, it is both if it is a business that creates art. Without the art (product), it would not have a business.
Art is just a product. Like any product, it can be produced for profit, for personal use, for communal use, or for any other reason. But without goods and services being produced, no money will be exchanged. The goods and services are a precondition to business, not the other way around.
Sorry about deleting the post. Couldn't remeber if beehaw was one of the instances with rules again dissenting opinions after some time away from Lemmy (I'm pretty sure there was one which would rather be without).
But I think you managed to quote most of it.
Being wanted/needed should be viewed in relation to everything else you could do with the resources available is my point. Not only your particular hobby/interest.
And I still maintain that if you want pure art, you are better off lowering your expectations for professionalism and find people who do it for reasons that are not financial.
Except that this is a red-herring; they invested in a company (e.g. Squenix) in the first place because they believed it would outperform other investment choices. They gambled, and they lost, and they are trying to make that out to be the company's fault instead of their own. "But I could have invested elsewhere"- but you didn't, and now you're trying to socialize losses, while you would have privatized gains.
No thanks. I'll just continue rejecting the premise that corporate profit is a good thing to measure all things in life by. This is just another variation of labor devaluation that Capitalism does to all things that it can't (easily) exploit to enrich the Bourgeoisie.