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Comment by john_minsk | Hacker News Reader

A sign that Investors in this company are not looking to build long term fundamental business. They are there only to rip off immediate profit. Too bad.

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Christmas, new console releases, new graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, and a pandemic. Take the pandemic out of the equation and it is still extraordinarily rare to have all of those events at the same time.

Weigh the costs of having a bad release against the costs of missing these extraordinary circumstances. It’s not hard to see why they made the decision they did.

And just so 2020 can give you a kick in the teeth on the way out the door, you can't buy any of these technological wonders unless you pay a scalper on eBay a 100% premium.

Alas, can't buy neither a new 3080 nor a new PS5. Imagine the sales numbers if supply wasn't so badly constrained

Supply is artificially constrained by bot-wielding cartels of middlemen with the aim only to “flip” them for profit.

If people would stop buying the middlemen’s supply, their exclusivity premium would evaporate, and the rest of the supply chain would be able to catch up and serve the real demand.

That bot-wielding only works on products where supply is limited. Otherwise they’d be scalping every single sector of PC hardware, not just the new GPUs.

History shows that great games will be successful no matter what. Something like World of Warcraft is successful simply because product is great, not because it was released at the right moment. May be CDP had reasons to do what they did - I'm not questioning that. But what it shows - CDP is just another game studio. I would like to see some company to go Apple-way, price their games accordingly, take their time and earn some reputation, but release games that are great time after time. CDP gave this hope after Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk PR but failed to deliver. The game is still good, so they might be still on the path. We will see in the next iteration. May be Blizzard makes comeback and releases something epic again. It takes someone like Steve Jobs to pull this off and may be in game industry it is tricky.

Anyway, this is how I think about it.

Is this not a fundamental truth of shareholder value theory? No one should be surprised when a duck quacks.

No it isn't. Shareholders have no interest in owning a failing company, it is in their best interests for the company to be sucessful and profitable because they are the ones with skin in the game.

Oh so then shareholders do not care about quarterly dividends and constant growth forever?

Publicly owned companies are all inherently sick.

Shareholders demonstratably don’t care about dividends since many large companies like Amazon/Uber don’t have any, aren’t even ever going to be profitable, but just have a really cool story.

But theoretically shareholders don’t care about these things as long as the company will grow a lot in the next 30 years. There are some alternative stock markets set up to encourage this.

And stockholders hardly exercise their powers. CEOs tend to not get fired.

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