Gaming

To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There's plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.

When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don't think it'll happen before then.

This is the correct answer.

When a company only has to please customers they are allowed to bend and in extreme cases break their own rules for a customer to be satisfied.

When you have to please share holders and customers. You as a laborer must decide to please the customer or the share holders. Sadly the longer you work somewhere the more like you are to please a customer if you work with them directly. The further you are from the customer the more likely you are to disagree with choosing customer satisfaction over shareholder satisfaction. Begin enshitirication.

That's interesting. Are there other large non public gaming companies? I actually want to ask this outside of gaming, but don't want to stray outside the community.

Gabe himself is worth over 4 billion.

Okay, I may have misplaced few zeros here ant there, my apologies.

I fear when lord gaben dies volvo will go public and enshittification will begin

The fact that you said Volvo on accident brings me back to the old ThioJoe troll days

If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn't I earn money via dividends?

You do. Companies give dividends all the time (well, every x months, usually at least yearly).

It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?

Just greed... mostly. A lot of people want to "get rich quick", and a bunch of already rich people like to gamble to get even richer, so a lot of market volatility comes from greed... but a share price with good growth expectations can make it attractive enough that the company may decide to give lower dividends (no need to attract people), so if you can "buy low, sell high", you may still want to do it regardless.

You can still ride the market mostly on dividends by diversifying and investing into multiple companies whose share prices will average out in the long run (picking the right diversified portfolio, is an art on itself).

need to make more next quarter

That's mostly an effect of tying C-suite compensations too closely to share prices, with no further checks in place. When the main driving force behind the decision makers is increasing share prices, they'll happily burn down the whole company, cash out, and jump ship.

Sometimes it's done on purpose, when some long-time investors grow tired and decide to cash out, maybe because they expect a change in the market and the company becoming less competitive or even obsolete. If the expected changes are big enough, it's easier to start a new company from scratch, than to restructure an old behemoth with thousands of people used to doing things "like they've always been done".