Mirko Ernkvist

Enmeshed in Games with the Government Governmental Policies and the Development of the Chinese Online Game Industry

The policies and regulations of governments affect the online game industry in a variety of ways, especially in countries with extensive state involvement and a low degree of transparency in the economy. This article examines the influence of governmental policies on the development and operation of online games in China. The stance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) toward online games has been influenced by three aspects of state policy: (a) information control, (b) technonationalism, and (c) social fears/pragmatic nationalism. CCPs specific policies toward the online game industry were put forward by CCP ministries and the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) as a response to the economic potential and increasing influence of the rapidly growing online game industry in China. The interaction of these different policy fields has had complementary and contradictory elements shaping their implementation.

Internationalisation of the Korean online game industry: exemplified through the case of NCsoft

Companies from Korea have become leading actors in the rapidly growing global online game market, being a knowledge and creativity intensive industry. The development of the industry raises a number of questions of the internationalisation process of companies in the intersection of creative- and technology-intensive industries. Co-evolution with user groups also requires interpretation and linkages to knowledge of local user preferences, creating additional challenges in the internationalisation strategy, through the product-service interaction. This paper explores the internationalisation efforts of the Korean online game industry through a case study of the country’s leading online game company.

Differentiation in digital creative industry cluster dynamics: the growth and decline of the Japanese video game software industry

ABSTRACT The growth of digital creative industries has received increasing interest in economic geography, but our knowledge of factors shaping the longer-term growth and decline of digital creative industry clusters remains limited. We address this issue through a longitudinal case study of the Japanese video game software industry during the last three decades. Drawing on a theoretical framework emphasizing the link between differentiation of game intellectual properties (IPs) and competitiveness in creative industries, we suggest that an important role in the growth and subsequent decline of the Japanese video game industry could be attributed to enabling and constraining changing technological and market conditions related to the Japanese cluster’s ability to produce differentiated game IPs. A previously highly competitive system lost much of its competitiveness. Technological change in the industry made it difficult for the Japanese cluster to maintain previous levels of differentiation when facing increasing development costs and less cross-sectoral cultural skill transfer.