One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games

games are highly accessible experiences that gradually monetize over time.

Once consumer spending switched toward digital distribution and the adoption of new devices, the overall competitive value of these new technologies became clear, and all major game makers moved to adopt new innovations and strategies. Rather than selling individual units to consumers and emulating the product model, the service-based approach has

Monitoring video content and live-streaming, in contrast, enables creative firms to gather consumer feedback and add or remove aspects of a game to maximize its chances of success at launch. Unlike magazines, gaming video content presents a real-time feed of what audiences are playing and watching.

Music and film, but also print publishing, magazines, and cable television, similarly face high and increasing production and marketing costs, strongly seasonal patterns, long development cycles, and hit-driven economics (more on this later). To understand how interactive entertainment has managed to grow so prosperously, we need to take a closer l

Succinctly put, for every blowout success, dozens of titles fail to deliver on expectations. The winner-takes-most aspect of game publishing means that an organization is either doing really well or dying.

Live-streamers bypass this pressure of large corporations trying to influence an individual reviewer to a degree and, more important, allow consumers to see a game in detail before committing to it. This neutrality has resulted in viewers growing loyal to a particular personality or player and wanting to watch them play online. It is not unlike rad

According to an analysis of the revenue distribution for several of the classic genres on consoles, the top-ten titles account for more than 90 percent of consumer spending.

The impact of a well-thought out campaign involving live-streamers compared with a more traditional approach is tangible, as Electronic Arts discovered in 2019. Despite putting most of its weight behind building momentum for the release of its new sci-fi shooter, Anthem, another one of its own titles, free-to-play Battle Royale shooter Apex Legends

Moreover, because Pokémon GO encouraged people to roam their physical environment to look for Pokémon, it made sense to time the release during the summer because of better weather conditions. Consequently, crowds would gather around key locations in the game represented by real-world locations where rare Pokémon could be found, allowing others to

On the basis of an extensive data set combined with detailed case studies, I show that rather than relying solely on creative merit, critical and commercial success in video games is more often than not the result of formulating an innovative business strategy. Set against a background of the broader structural shift from a product-based business t