The Role of Multi-Sided Business Models in Managing Creative Ecosystems: The Case of the Online Video Game Industry

The digital age and the explosion of mobile entertainment have made online games the most profitable segment of the video game industry (over 50% of worldwide sales). The incredible success of these online games lies notably in the openness of content with a user community (Parmentier and Gandia, 2013), implying the development of a creative ecosystem that engages players over the long term in a dynamic of innovation profitable to video game actors. However, the strategic management of this type of ecosystem is complex, not least because companies need to orchestrate different types of resources within different types of spaces with different types of gamers to create different types of value. To meet this challenge, many organizations are adopting multi-sided business models (BMs), which have the advantage of decoupling value logic between different sides (different user groups) in order to multiply the sources of value creation and capture, notably through network effects (Gandia and Parmentier, 2017). However, understanding the role of these multi-sided BM in the strategic management of creative ecosystems remains unknown. This is the objective of this chapter. Based on several case studies of innovative video game companies (Ankama, Nadeo/Ubisoft, Compulsion, Vidcoin) we show how the multi-sided architecture of the BM makes it possible to orchestrate creative resources within dedicated spaces of exploration and exploitation (the BM sides). We also show that the creative ecosystem is interwoven with the community ecosystem, resulting in a blurring of organizational boundaries in favor of a more open creativity-centric model. This interweaving is made possible by the co-production of new creative capabilities. Our chapter provides numerous implications and recommendations for managers wishing to use a multi-sided BM architecture to harness the creative potential of a user community.