Abstract

The video game industry has substantially transformed itself in the last decade. Game companies had to adapt to fit into the new logic of production and consumption dominating the global market. In the continuous evolution of digital communication, technologies like social network systems, mobile devices, app stores, and live-streaming broadcasting allied to their capacity to gather and move a large amount of user data, have each played crucial roles in speeding up the rate of change in the game industry. This rapid transformation has also affected players. While expert players had to adapt to new ways of paying for and playing games, subjecting themselves to new designs, mechanics and gameplay, newbies found new opportunities to expand their gameplay.
Drawing from Kline et al. (2003), this dissertation examines the current state of the game industry, underlining the significant changes it has been facing over the years. In their scholarship, Kline and colleagues developed an analytical tool to investigate the video game medium in the context of a high-intensity marketplace. I make use of their circuitry to investigate the current context surrounding the game industry. In broad strokes, this study examines how the industry’s new business models and strategies influence and leverage these circuits, which, in turn, interferes, accelerates, and intensifies the interconnections between them, generating new layers of interactivity at every turn.
The video game industry is massive in scope, and its business strategies vary according to each developer’s size and ambitions. Thus, this research focuses on two mainstream companies as a case study: Electronic Arts and Tencent. By following these companies' production practices and business strategies in the last decade, this study attempts to understand the processes that shaped the game industry during the 2010s. This research uses critical political economy and textual analysis as methodological tools to look closely at a large corpus of documents. As this research demonstrates, the interplay between the circuits tends to be guided by the marketing circuit; accordingly, the intense acceleration between the circuits and the formation of new layers of interactivity entail the reduction of social and cultural relationships to mere monetary transactions.