Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

This chapter aims to analyze the extent to which the born global approach to internationalization can be used to understand the internationalization of small-sized game development firms. The interview data were analyzed by the operationalization of concepts based on the three categories of founder, organizational and macro-environmental drivers to internationalize. The findings show that the firms can be aligned with the different stages of their business development. This paper concludes that the first of these three stages, the subcontractors, are not born global, even though game developers must develop games with global market potential. However, firms that develop their own game are pushed to internationalize immediately by the heavily globalized and digitalized nature of the industry.

Video Game development is driven more and more by the input from player communities – both prior to release and post-release. This study focuses on a particular game community using a netnographic approach and applies the theoretical lens of free innovation. Data stems from analyzing 1,798 forum threads based on players’ ideas and suggestions, 9 interviews with active forum contributors and 2 community managers. NVivo software was used to code the suggestion threads into themes. Subsequently, the themes were analyzed based on the extent to which they were implemented into the game within the timeframe of the first four months post-release. This study thus sheds light on community management in the video games industry and players spending their free time on idea generation. Moreover, through thematic coding, the article offers a potential method on how to converge the vast amount of qualitative data stemming from player communities’ suggestions.

The authors argue in this chapter that business model innovations need to be linked to continuous technological innovation. The video games industry is a good example of the intertwining of these aspects over time. External technological advancements can force firms to adjust their business models, but, in some cases, the technology needs to be adapted to fit the current business model innovation. The authors show that business model innovation, related to a digitally transformed industry, mostly involves subscription-based revenue streams linked to cloud-based technologies. The insights from this chapter should help other industries undergoing digital transformation to reformulate their business model innovations in similar ways. The music (Spotify), movie (Netflix) and photography (Instagram) sectors can be considered forerunners in the context of for business model innovation in a digitally transformed era.

A particularity of the video game industry is that oftentimes consumers and user communities are involved and used as a source of innovation for the development process. Digitalization has made it easier for developers to engage with their communities and communication has shifted from a one-way towards a two-way communication between developer and community. This article sets out to investigate whether engagement in online communities by the game developers has an effect on the innovativeness of the final product. Moreover, the article examines the effect of Development Speed on innovativeness.The data for this study was collected through structured survey interviews from 176 Swedish video game development projects. The data is analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that Online Community Engagement and Development Speed have a significant effect on the Innovativeness of a game. The paper highlights that adding a social dimension - by involving online communities in form of a two-way communication in the development process - has a beneficial effect on a game’s innovativeness.

The field of international business research is in a constant debate on how, and if, adapting its concepts to the digital developments of recent times is necessary. The aim of this literature review is to contribute to the discussion by examining research that investigates internationalization of firms and where digitalization plays a major role in the article's research context. The review uses bibliometric analysis which is a systematic review method that creates a representation of a research area’s structure by ranking publications, journal or authors based on analysis of citations, co-citations, and bibliographic coupling. The bibliometric analysis reveals interesting insights – including which outlets publish the most and who are the most central authors in that subfield. Thus, this review serves as a basis for the debate in IB on whether the traditional theories still serve its purpose – by looking at articles that apply these theories in a digital context.