BRIE Working Paper 2021-12 The Little Engines That Could: Game industry

Due to the emergence of digital platforms in the game industry over the last decade, the industry is now challenging the digital platform incumbents in metaverse development. [...] As a consequence, from the perspective of digitalization, the facilitation of the interactions is becoming more and more concentrated in the platform domain. [...] A decade ago in the mobile phone business, for example, the platformization of the smart phone operating systems transformed the entire industry, leading to a significant change in the bottlenecks and the gate-keeping control points in the value chain. [...] Who weaves the fabric of the new reality? Should the efforts towards building a system-of-systems-level metaverse platform be successful, the question that naturally follows is who will be the market-makers, the owners of the fabric of this new reality, and how will this affect the value capturing ability across industries and geographies? Unity, the provider of the most popular game engine at the. [...] Thirdly, if the game industry platforms and the metaverse development are successful in system-of-systems-level integration across industries, one key consideration is whether the game industry companies can challenge the current digital platform incumbents, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, as the providers of the next generation of digital infrastructure.