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With Epic, and most companies, it's not even that they don't make more profit each year - but that investors (shareholders) now expect not a net growth in revenue/profit, but a net growth on the net growth in profit!
I know it sounds confusing so let me break it down:
Company makes X1 profit one year.
Next year, company makes X1 + 3% profit (X2 is thus X1 * 1.03)
The following year, the company makes X2 + 9% profit (X3 is thus X2 * 1.09, or X1 * 1.03 * 1.09)
Then the year after that, the company makes X3 + 12% (aka X4 = X3 * 1.12 = X2 * 1.09 * 1.12 = X1 * 1.03 * 1.09 * 1.12).
The net growth on net growth is thus explained as 3% to 9% to 12%.
And investors/shareholders are now demanding not just that revenue grows but that the growth of revenue also grows linearly.
Meaning if in the fifth year, the revenue grows, but only by, say, 2%, they consider that as a bad year because the last year the growth was 12%, so this is a 10% setback, aka time to bring in a "shaker", who fires half the departments to save money, introduces bullshit "oh poor company doesn't have money" customer-facing crap like Epic just did; then pick up a hefty bonus and fuck off to the next company to ruin.
What you're describing is called a Growth Stock as opposed to a Mature Stock. I heard these terms recently when reading about the AI bubble and will just quote the relevant parts, because the author describes it better than I ever could:
Pluralistic: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI from Cory Doctorow
Except every company is a growth stock now. Automotive, insurance, healthcare, energy companies are all working hard to accelerate growth
Well, not exactly.
A growth stock is just that, a company that is expected to grow. These expectations are usually set by market analysts, based on historical data of the past 5 years, and tons of other metrics.
The problem is that what I described is not just growth, but the growth of growth. To put it in other words, most companies will only ever achieve more or less linear growth due to limiting factors (reach of product, available resources, etc. - e.g. you can't manufacture 2 billion phones a year because there's simply no 2 billion screens being produced, or you couldn't sell 2 billion phones because there's no 2 billion customers who'd all buy the same device). Some does experience short periods of exponential growth (that is when year on year the company's growth increases, as I described above), 3-5 years at most, and that's it.
The issue is that now shareholders demand that every company be growing exponentially, during a time of increasing poverty (inflation is high, pay hasn't been catching up to it, leading to reduced spending by the average people, having less disposable income, and because of all that, less products are being bought, making less profit to companies).
And there's another aspect as well - a loss of general humanity in investments over the past ~30 years, with investment corporation stacks buying up everything and anything valuable. This led to investors being corporations owned by corporations owned by corporations, and shares/companies at the bottom of the ladder are nothing more than numbers.
The issue with this is simple - the companies that depend on a wealthy enough population to buy their crap, are closing down companies and killing off jobs to bolster short term profits, leading to the "reason" why they wanted the short term profits: because sales are dropping because people have less disposable income. It's basically a self reinforcing death spiral on a global scale, all caused by some wankers' greed and lack of understanding of economics.
I always remember the story about how a bank failed to make a record profit however made $6 billion in profit.