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Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The inflation rate is about 3%, so the people at Xbox worked very hard all year to have about the same value they put into it.

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All the people were paid a salary for the work they did. And there was still money leftover .

That is an ideal way of seeing this. As a for-profit company their priority is shareholder value, so the focus isn't "people paid and games were made", it's the money left-over, and even more importantly that the number must grow.

Only if you count the value of the games produced as $0

Wouldn't a fair way to count the value be all of the money selling them produced minus all of the money you spent producing them?

No, because the customers bought the games. That means the customers valued the games at some value higher than the purchase price. There's a ton of surplus value for society produced as part of this process that doesn't end up on a company's balance sheet.

That's pretty accurate when you consider the unfiltered slop produced by studios like Bethesda, Blizzard, Activision, King and most other Microsoft XBox studios.

So, even worse than 0, if we’re saying the value of games is not measurable but substantial?

It's a question of "value created" vs "value captured". They captured about as much value as the risk-free rate of return.

Value that is created but not captured (e.g. the value of consumers enjoying games and consoles above and beyond the price that those consumers paid) is typically not considered when making business decisions.

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