Playing on High Difficulty: The Trade Barriers of Modern Video Gaming
Over the course of the last few decades, video games have evolved from being a niche of the entertainment industry to being a major pillar, generating revenues greater than even blockbuster films (Zackariasson & Wilson, 2010). Multinational companies invest tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars into developing the most technologically advanced video games they possibly can. These companies compete primarily on an international level, since only a global market can generate the returns that make such investment worthwhile. There is virtually no such thing as national gaming markets, outside of niched East Asian segments that are culturally alien to the globalized pastiche of Western culture. Another aspect worth pointing out is that the gaming market is increasingly of the “winner takes all” variety, where a product must, without exception, come up to the highest standards of quality for the category that it belongs to in order to have any chance against those offered by the competition (Nieborg, 2011a). These two factors combined mean that any game that is not good enough to achieve international success can be considered a failure. More
