The 2023 CREATE working paper 'Gaming without Frontiers: Copyright and Competition in the Changing Video Game Sector' by Aysel Gizem Yaşar, Amy Thomas, Kenny Barr and Magali Eben states
This working paper examines aspects of the contemporary video games sector at a time when incumbent and new-entrant market participants vie for primacy in the games industry. In this setting, ownership configurations and business models of key actors are in a state of flux. As consumers increasingly access culture ‘on-demand’ by way of cloud technologies, myriad opportunities and challenges emerge, not only for the video games sector, but for the wider cultural industries and society as a whole. It is in this very dynamic industrial landscape that the working paper is located.
The paper marks a starting point for collaborative research on the games industry, drawing on the range of expertise within CREATe to provide a more holistic view of innovation, creativity, and power dynamics in games. The authors draw on different research specialisms and interests including: digitalisation of the cultural industries; copyright and notions of user creativity; digital services and product market definition; and competition law, innovation and the role of technology. The paper draws on each of these specialisms in turn. It starts by providing the industrial context of the discussion and analysis. This feeds into three analytical sections examining: user creativity and intellectual property in video games; the implications of industry concentration for different articulations of creativity; and finally, an exploration of the potential ramifications of developments in the games sector for innovation at the dawn of the metaverse era.
In doing so, this work sets the scene for future research, which brings together competition law, IP law, and cultural policy perspectives. With questions formulated throughout the paper, the authors embark on a project to review the changing landscape of gaming and its implications for creativity, innovation, access and integration. ... Transformations do not occur merely within the more traditional confines of ‘games’. As the gaming industry goes through a cloud transformation, it is also providing the basis for the development of something bigger: the metaverse. While virtual environments known as metaverse are still in their infancy, their connection to the gaming sector is clear. Popular games and gaming platforms like Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox have been labelled ‘proto metaverses’. The immersive experience of metaverse lends itself well to gaming. At least some of the M&A trend in the gaming sector seems motivated by metaverse development. Established players in the gaming industry, like Microsoft and Epic Games, are taking shots at different aspects of metaverse. As such, metaverse development is an integral part of this project.
Despite this close connection however, the metaverse goes beyond gaming, and metaverse projects encompass many aspects of human lives, from socialising to work, fitness, and even psychotherapy. Metaverse players are emerging outside of the gaming sector. It also has the potential to foster user creativity far beyond what video games have allowed so far and open up different business models. The authors of this paper are interested in the historical and contemporary connections between gaming and the metaverse. Some of the concentration trends and user creativity in the metaverse run parallel to the research focus in the gaming sector, setting the scene for an investigation into corresponding regulatory regimes.
This paper is not intended to provide clear answers on what the changes in the games industry mean for IP or competition law. Rather, it aims to bring together a range of perspectives, identifying central research questions which can best be answered through a multi-perspective lens. The authors of this paper draw on different research specialisms and interests including: digitalisation of the cultural industries, copyright and notions of user creativity, digital services and product market definition, and competition law, innovation and the role of technology. The paper draws on each of these specialisms in turn. It starts by providing the industrial context of the discussion and analysis. This feeds into the three analytical sections examining: user creativity and intellectual property in video games; the implications of industry concentration for different articulations of creativity; and finally, an exploration of the implications of developments in the games sector for innovation at the dawn of the vaunted metaverse era. The concluding section synthesises each of these component parts in the closing discussion. It identifies the questions which will underpin the future research of the CREATe games project.
