There’s absolutely no obligation to be penny pinching for public companies, the leadership is obligated to act in the best interests of the company but that’s about it.
The motivations and reward schemes may be very different, public company CEO may be incentivised to maximise share price for instance and that may attract the kind of psychopath that will try and maximise share price by penny pinching - equally I don’t think anyone could make a serious argument that being more like Steam would be acting against the best interests of a company selling games.
public company CEO may be incentivised to maximise share price
It’s not even really CEOs that make all the bad decisions. Layoffs for instance are almost always in reality a direct decision by the board, and the board members of public companies are usually even worse people (and in many cases just a direct representative of a bigger company so it bubbles to the same worst people at the top) than the CEOs, as hard as that is to believe
There’s absolutely no obligation to be penny pinching for public companies, the leadership is obligated to act in the best interests of the company but that’s about it.
The motivations and reward schemes may be very different, public company CEO may be incentivised to maximise share price for instance and that may attract the kind of psychopath that will try and maximise share price by penny pinching - equally I don’t think anyone could make a serious argument that being more like Steam would be acting against the best interests of a company selling games.
It’s not even really CEOs that make all the bad decisions. Layoffs for instance are almost always in reality a direct decision by the board, and the board members of public companies are usually even worse people (and in many cases just a direct representative of a bigger company so it bubbles to the same worst people at the top) than the CEOs, as hard as that is to believe