Understanding Danish games development 2000 – 2010: What’s next?

Abstract

The present thesis aimed at answering two questions. What has been the biggest cause of the unsatisfactory performance in the Danish games developers’ industry from 2000 – 2010? And how are the developers doing today in regards to this problem? With these questions in mind, the first objective was to establish an overall perspective on the challenges faced by the Danish games development industry over the years 2000 – 2010, and then pin out the single most important issue. The second objective was to analyze how the developers are dealing with this issue today. This took form of an analytical framework of the business environment, here labeled the games field. Building on the framework of Michael Porter and secondary data (publicly available data), my initial market analysis led to the proposal of 9 issues identified as possible candidates to be ranked as the most important. I operationalized my findings through a ranking scale exercise targeting managers in the industry, and although there was no clear “winner”, I found a few of the problems to stand out from the rest. These were reflected on and in the end decided the focus for the second objective. Having settled on the issue of insufficient commercial management the second part of my thesis works in detail with some of the relatively few theoretical frameworks and research studies that target specifically the modern commercialization of creative work. Despite the many differences between the Danish developers, and the problems of generalization, I believe the thesis delivers a broad understanding as well as an in-depth analysis on one of the very important problems experienced in the games development industry.