It’s a combination of things, really. Global markets and the Internet has changed how firms compete. They no longer compete to have more customers. Thanks to globalization and the Internet, the customer base for any given company is essentially infinite, or at least much bigger than firms need. What’s scarce is investment capital, and equity markets are growing more and more speculative as time goes on. Investors are buying, not on the expected dividends they’ll receive as a share of the profits, but on their ability to flip the stock to sell at a higher price, to another investor who are themselves expecting to flip the stock, there’s absolutely no regards to the fundamentals of the business. It’s like watching a group of house flippers buy all the properties in a neighborhood and flip them a little, then sell them to one another, and the property values just keep going up.

We saw this with D&D Beyond and Wizards of the Coast. A whistleblower from within the company said that the executives see the customers as an “obstacle to their money”. Under that mindset, you don’t have customers to serve, you have assets to monetize, and customers are preventing you from monetizing said assets.