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mobile games. Both these areas also appeared to have potentially disruptive
ef ects on this growing industry. In addition, casual and serious games were
deemed to have growth potential.
Thus, video games are clearly driving economic growth, value added
and job creation with potentially innovation-induced disruptive ef ects. In
addition video games provide an interesting case of an industry at the cross-
roads of the ICT sector (software) and the cultural/media/content indus-
tries, a fact which creates interesting dynamics as well as tensions when it
comes to policy-making (e.g. subsidies). At the same time, perceived nega-
tive side-ef ects and, perhaps, a lack of seriousness seem to have defl ected
the attention of European industrial policymakers away from the video
game industry, in spite of its economic opportunities and strategic poten-
tial. This contrasts sharply with some sectoral policies designed in, e.g.
Canada and South Korea (Simon 2012a). Hence we saw a risk of policy
“under-attention” resulting in public underinvestment. This lack of policy
attention was also refl ected in a lack of overviews and analyses of the Euro-
pean video game industry.
Hence our research was deemed to fulfi l a gap in several ways, with
the ultimate aim of providing implications for EU-level industrial policy-
making. The research is based on literature reviews, desk research, expert
interviews, workshops and a synthesis of existing knowledge (De Prato et
al. 2010). The research has been updated for the purposes of this chapter.
The rest of chapter is structured as follows. The following section out-
lines and analyses quantitatively and qualitatively the position of European
fi rms in the traditional (ol ine) video game software value network, i.e.
in the activities of game development, middleware production, publishing,
marketing, distribution and retail.
The third section aims to identify major disruptive trends and their poten-
tial structural (value network) impacts. These trends include the emergence
of online, social and mobile games, providing opportunities for new actors
to enter the evolving video games ecosystem (start-ups or players diversify-
ing from other industries) and new business models.
The chapter ends with summarizing the main conclusions and provid-
ing some implications for the European video game software industry and
its policymakers.
THE EUROPEAN VIDEO GAME SOFTWARE ECOSYSTEM
This section outlines and analyses quantitatively and qualitatively the posi-
tion of European fi rms in the traditional video game software value net-
work. First, we establish the received view of how the video game software
value network is confi gured. A value network is taken as consisting of three
basic building blocks: roles, actors and relationships, where (1) a role is a
distinct value-adding activity within the value network; (2) an actor is a
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