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Comment by NotGMan | Hacker News Reader

Probably through "line must always go up" mentality.

Creative business, especially games, should really not be publicly traded or thought of as having major returns on investments.

It might work on start, but sooner or later the "current hit game" will fade out of popularity and then people will get fired and crunch will become the norm etc... in order to satisfy the "line must go up" mentality, but since game dev is a hit driven business that clashes with the "Line must go up" concept at its core since, being a hit driven business, means that it's totaly unpredictable.

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The video game business is very similar to the film or literary publishing business. You need to publish ten novels for one to do well enough financially to pay off the others. Nobody really knows why that one worked. It's possible to do a few sequels, but the formula quickly becomes boring.

No one can guarantee the commercial success of a novel, film or video game.

That's why equity investment in creative endeavors is an entire class of business. Possible to risk-balance adjustment, similar to anything else.

Do we have any source or other data indicating that this happened here?

Is this not the legally obligated line of thinking for american companies? You have some leeway to argue with only providing value to shareholders in some specific manner, but not much.

Most companies try to operate at a profit and actually increase those profits over time. That said, reasoning that Annapurna failed only because of that requires some impressive mental gymnastics

"Value" is whatever shareholders want it to be.

In the case of a public company that is assumed to be profit, because the shareholders are a vast and ever changing group. Annapurna isn't public, so it serves whatever the private owners want.

Even in a publicly traded stock, the company charter can specify something other than profit. The shareholders know that when they buy stock.

In other words there is more leeway than we commonly give credit. The notion of a fiduciary duty to be greedy is pushed by psychopathic CEOs but isn't really what the law says.

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