Through the Looking Glass Sharply - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 228

relationship to everyday life and work. He concludes, “I can compare this
brain network to the Zerg Hive in StarCraft , where all beings are actually
part of a single great Being and share joy and pain, brilliant ideas and bad
thinking. Video games or gamifi cation may not be the defi nitive tools that
will complete the apparently contradictory duality (the superhuman, on the
one side, and a multi-mind system of governance network 2.0, on the other
side), which in my opinion will be necessary to deal with the problems of
the future, but they are probably the prelude to the appearance of a new,
future tool that would help build a path for cooperation and expression, for
the construction of a happier and funnier world, for improved social values
and a healthy feeling of belonging to and creation of a group, in short, for
intrinsic motivation or self-motivation. We do not need more games, we do
not need more stimuli; we need more time outs to use our minds to breathe
life into our games and our stimuli”.
As we look to the future, Giuditta de Prato, Sven Lindmark and Jean-
Paul Simon have commented on the software segment of the industry
with special emphasis on Europe. After their analysis, they suggest, “In
conclusion, the video game industry, especially its software segment, is a
rapidly growing industry undergoing potentially disruptive changes, with
revamping value networks and new types of fi rms entering and providing
spillovers to other industries with uses beyond the pure fun of playing.
As such, it clearly provides economic growth opportunities for companies
and regions, including Europe. Given this strategic importance of the video
game industry, it is perhaps time for industrial policy to take it more seri-
ously”. It would be hard to conceive of a scenario where the industry is not
taken seriously with regard to fi nancial development.
Within this framework of looking to the future, we, Peter Zackariasson
and Tim Wilson, see a need to look at 1) the future of consoles, 2) the com-
petitive situation for publishers and 3) the market in evolving economies.

THE FUTURE FOR CONSOLES

In his early work on competition, Michael Porter (1979) argued that indus-
tries can be defi ned too narrowly. Consequently, that argument went on to
defi ne his “fi ve forces” model of competition, which has become a founda-
tion for strategic marketing management. The Porter forces included:

• the threat of new entrants

• the bargaining power of customers

• the bargaining power of suppliers

• the threat of substitute products or services (where applicable)

• jockeying among current contestants

The Economist has this comment on the business of gaming: