Comment by banannaise
2 years ago
The problem is that executives will ask "what makes Stardew Valley successful?" and never make it to this answer:
A developer who genuinely cares about the quality of the game, interacts positively with the community around it, and makes decisions that demonstrate his caring for the game and the community. Specifically, decisions that often leave revenue on the table, particularly in the short term but arguably in the long term as well.
That sort of caring is largely impossible for private equity, and it's really hard to successfully fake.
I think there's an even more-overlooked factor that most people never get to: Good-old random chance in timing and markets and events.
We humans are hardwired to hate that idea, we always want an understandable story with distinct causes and effects... So much so that we will often invent one, even for things we "know" are random, like: "Okay, now the next one will almost certainly be heads, because..."
It's a failure of our internal simulatory abilities. People are usually much more confident in their counterfactual beliefs than they have any right to be. Self reinforced internal narratives ("if only this had happened then this would have happened") seem necessary in order for us to maintain confidence in our predictive abilities. I wonder if we were truly aware of the surrounding cloud of possible alternative outcomes, if it'd be paralyzing for otherwise mundane activities. How many times do we escape death by the thinnest margins everyday, without ever being the wiser.
That's because caring and liquidity/fungibility are at opposing poles. People sell cattle but not their pet cows. Something like that.