Edit: This question attracted way more interest than I hoped for! I will need some time to go through the comments in the next days, thanks for your efforts everyone. One thing I could grasp from the answers already - it seems to be complicated. There is no one fits all answer.
Under capitalism, it seems companies always need to grow bigger. Why can’t they just say, okay, we have 100 employees and produce a nice product for a specific market and that’s fine?
Or is this only a US megacorp thing where they need to grow to satisfy their shareholders?
Let’s ignore that most of the times the small companies get bought by the large ones.
This is also the issue with private investment companies.
When the EA deal was announced, people said more or less “this is proof that private isn’t any better than public”. Well that’s sort of true - there’s no guarantee that private is any better, but it CAN be, depends on who owns it. In the case of EA games, it was bought as an investment by a bunch of greedy investors, of course it’s going to be as bad as, if not worse than, a public corp.
It’s literally sad that the only hope for EA to become less scummy as a privately held company, than it was as a publicly traded company, is for the Saudi Arabian regime to proactively use them to win over gamers through the digital equivalent of ‘sports-washing’.
It’s depressing to think that we are at a point where EA could be considered the lesser evil in comparison.