Phil Spencer blames capitalism for games industry woes: 'I don't get [the] luxury of not having to run a profitable growing business'

www.pcgamer.com Phil Spencer blames capitalism for games industry woes: 'I don't get [the] luxury of not having to run a profitable growing business'

Spencer said publicly traded companies have to show constant growth or else nobody will give them money.

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you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth—because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow?

I thought the way it was supposed to work was, a company starts out investing in its growth and during this period shareholders get gains from the price of the stock going up, and then when it has maxed out just switch to shoveling the profits into dividends instead? If the industry has stopped growing, I don't see why there isn't a path to acknowledging that to investors, what am I missing?
- Growth is more valuable than dividends, and there's always more room for growth in the eyes of investors.
  
  Growth is more valuable than dividends
  
  Shouldn't that depend on the dollar amounts? Why would $X of dividends be worse than $X of stock growth? And if growth just isn't in the cards anymore, it would be in reality a worse bet as the companies pour resources into a black hole of false hope and self sabotage seeking something that isn't actually going to happen.
  
  Growth stocks rise more because they carry more risk than steady dividend payouts. In a perfect dividend world, dividends would match growth, but because there is inherent risk in growth stocks there is a larger upswing
  
  There are competing schools of thought in the investment world, and Growth has solidly beaten Dividend investing. Even better, going for a market-weighted global index fund is best.
  
  You don’t pay tax on growth, you do on dividends. For large shareholders a high dividend can be a problem. Even for me, a very small time retail investor, I have to keep a balance of growth (like Apple) and dividend (I tend to use a dividend ETF so I can fairly reliably estimate my dividends) so I can avoid paying tax on the dividends.
  
  That makes a lot of sense. Seems like the way taxes are set up is creating perverse incentives here.

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