Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Eurostat, for instance) do not provide sui cient granular and recent data.
The data from trade and industry organizations and analyst fi rms also suf-
fer from methodological limitations. The support of something similar to
the European Audiovisual Observatory 12 (for fi lm and TV) for the video
game sector could therefore be contemplated.
This chapter has also shown that in an international perspective, the
European video game industry is rather weak compared to Japan and
North America. Europe is absent from the consoles hardware segment and
very few European companies are among the major publishers. Although
Europe hosts a large population of developers' studios and also supplies
quite a large share of world's middleware needs, most of the large devel-
opers are still found in the U.S. (and Canada) and Japan, and many of
them are controlled by (or dependent upon) large international publishing
companies. Clearly (as also stated by Kerr, this volume, for the UK game
industry), this implies a shift out of Europe, in terms of value capturing as
well as decisions on what games to develop in Europe.
The policy implications from this rather unbalanced situation are not
obviously derived. In fact, many proposals (at the national level) aim at
supporting game development activities, through, for instance, tax credits
and educational ef orts to alleviate acclaimed skills shortages in order to
avoid development activities moving to cheaper locations or locations with
state support (for the UK case, see again Kerr, this volume). In our view,
although such initiatives might be supportive for domestic game develop-
ment, they do not necessarily rebalance the power positions in the indus-
try. Instead, policy initiatives may need to focus on the opportunities and
threats that are induced by the major trends reshaping the industry.
This chapter identifi ed a number of major such disruptive trends and
their potential structural impacts. The most disruptive trend is that video
games are increasingly going online (and mobile). Some parts, like the dis-
tribution part of the value network, are vanishing and taking new forms.
Although the legacy value chain was dominated by two integrated models,
a publisher-centred (development, IPR, publishing, distribution) one for the
boxed products and a console-centred one with some overlapping and inte-
gration around the three main players, under the trends described the land-
scape is getting far more complex with not only both disintermediation and
re-intermediation taking place at the time, but also with competing models
brought by other players within or without the value chain.
The identifi ed trends may present opportunities for the European com-
panies to grow and strengthen their position. The European market is
likely to grow strongly over the next few years and will increasingly be
focused on the online market, in turn opening up opportunities, not the
least for SMEs. For instance, in Germany in 2009, two browser-based
game companies (Bigpoint, Gameforge) were among the fi ve fastest-
growing IT companies of the country. 13 The EU is seen as a “hotbed”
for game development overall and may become even more important as
 
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