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Comment by notsapiensatall | Hacker News Reader

Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company.

They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.

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Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them.

And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-use...

The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.

Also I'm pretty sure they are making enough money as they are. And don't need to chase that ever increasing stock valuation. Which might not even mean increased profits.

But public stocks seems to focus on valuation over profits, which is reasonable given how things turned out.

Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.

This is false. Amazon had zero profits for a very long time and was publicly traded. It did very well. There are numerous examples like this.

That is exactly what I said, publicly traded companies cares about growth over profits, while companies that never intends to go public and therefore doesn't benefit from valuations tend to care about profit over growth.

Profit and growth go together. In Amazon's case lots of profit is what fueled their growth: at each point they made far more money than needed to sustain, so they bought growth instead of paying out to shareholders.

The two are intricately related.

Sorry I misread your comment. Either way I don't think either extreme viewpoint is right. I'd say publicly traded companies and their investors care about both growth and profits for different reasons.

Retail investors and hedge funds do not always demand short-term results. If that was the case, Tesla and growth companies like it would simply not exist on the stock market. Instead, they are wildly popular.

But they plan to make money from selling the stocks, not from actual dividends.

What makes you think this? Did you look it up? Have a source?

Every 401k or other investment place I've seen allows either taking dividends or reinvesting them. I've never one seen a fund that picks only divide free or divided providing stocks as a choice.

And every big fund also provides all sorts of general index funds, which certainly contain both. And individual stocks themselves decide to pay dividends or not, and routinely change so.

I don't think your distinction is at all a relevant factor in these funds to nearly any end buyer.

Please provide a citation as to why you think your claim is true.

The majority of public shares are held in long term investments like 401ks, whose owners are most certainly interested in long term growth. Buy and hold is by far the biggest amount of investment type of stockholder. Most people don't care to fiddle with microtrading.

As the buffet bet made clear, and as the majority of advice and investors do, long term ownership outgrows those chasing short term returns, despite pop belief.

I think you vastly overestimate the dollar amounts behind stock owners.

Netflix is publicly traded and had managed to avoid shoving ads down the throats of user for almost as long as Steam has been around.

Steam is moreso lucky that the PC market was pretty much ignored by all the large game publishers for a very long time and had very little competition. We will see what happens in another 10 years now that even Sony is launching it's own PC launcher. PC is now more important (even Japan is finally opening to the gaming PC scene).

What was the rationale for publicly-traded companies again? Because it sounds like having publicly-traded companies make things worse for the companies themselves and for society in general.

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