No, it's not.
First, you are wrong about Rockstar and Take-Two. Rockstar is a subsidiary of Take-Two. In other words, it is owned entirely by Take-Two. Which
IS a publicly traded company.
It has been trading under the NASDAQ since 1997. By investing in T2, you are effectively investing into all of their subsidiaries because they own and control those subsidiaries.
Secondly, folks, let's make things clear once and for all. This kind of narrative that blames investors for everything is born out of people being completely uneducated on corporate structures and what kind of power shareholders actually have over companies.
Going public does not mean you relinquish power over your company. It
can but more often than not, it does not mean that at all. Most companies are smart enough to structure things so that they essentially retain control on everything. Might be a few extra hoops to jump through but you still get final say.
CDPR has nearly a 100 million shares. We know for a fact that almost 34% of those are owned by the same people who controlled CDPR when TW3 was being developed and they controlled more of it back when development decisions for CP2077 were being made.
Now I can already hear people going "but they don't control their company with 34%!". Theoretically, you're correct but have you ever tried getting a group of, say, 50 individuals to agree on a single thing? It's a fucking nightmare. You go ahead and try to do that with thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions. The simple fact is that when you are publicly traded with that many shares, a 30% share essentially means you get final say on everything.
At 30% control, unless you do something incredibly stupid, the chances of that other 70% banding together to overrule you is
ZERO. It basically means you control the outcome of pretty much any voting that takes place.
"But they have fiduciary duties to investors!". Yes they do! But that doesn't mean what people think it means. It means they have a duty to look out for the shareholders' best interest. The form that this takes is, in reality, very much up to the company. All it
really means is they can't go
against shareholders best interests. In other words, don't make decisions you
know will end up hurting your investors.
Furthermore, the majority of shareholders are not lizard people who don't care about the companies they invest in. Yes, some of them
may be lizard people (looking at you Zuckerberg) and some of them definitely don't care as long as they see a return on their investment but the majority are far more interested in their investment doing well so they can benefit from them for longer periods of time. Not to mention that many actually believe in their companies' missions/goals/products.
TL: DR - People subscribe to this idea that shareholders ruin everything because they saw this opinion somewhere and liked it. In reality shareholders don't have nearly as much power as people think they do in CDPR's decisional process.
Right?
I guess all it takes is a bunch of NPCs walking around being labelled as "prostitute" with a bit more cleavage showing to know a game isn't being "censored"?
It apparently makes the game more mature too.
You are confusing two very different things.
A private company can censor you. A government also can.
The difference is that a lot of countries around the world have laws against government censorship. That's generally where people get confused. They think free speech means free speech everywhere but it really only means your government can't control your speech* but private entities are (generally) allowed to censor you if what you want to say is not something they want on their platform (whatever shape that takes). Censorship is only the act of suppressing XYZ because you don't want XYZ to be seen/heard.
For example, if I was to speak of some political subject here and the mods deleted my post, they would effectively be censoring me BUT since it's a privately owned forum, CDPR gets to decide what can and cannot be discussed here. It's still censorship but it's legal. Change the moderator to a government official and it's now illegal in many countries.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not saying CDPR censored anything. I don't believe they did. For something to be censored, it first has to be put out there. If CP2077 was, at some point, full of sex and they had removed it all of sudden, sure they'd be censoring the game but that's not what happened.
*With various exceptions generally based around hate speech or other kinds of potentially dangerous situations. Yelling "FIRE" in a theater will get you in trouble and isn't protected under free speech folks.
