Game Industry Value Chain
Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill observes that the game industry value chain is made up of six connected and distinctive layers:
- Capital and publishing layer: involved in paying for development of new titles and seeking returns through licensing of the titles.
- Product and talent layer: includes developers, designers and artists, who may be working under individual contracts or as part of in-house development teams.
- Production and tools layer: generates content production tools, game development middleware, customizable game engines, and production management tools.
- Distribution layer: or the "publishing" industry, involved in generating and marketing catalogs of games for retail and online distribution.
- Hardware (or Virtual Machine or Software Platform) layer: or the providers of the underlying platform, which may be console-based, accessed through online media, or accessed through mobile devices such as smartphones. This layer now includes non-hardware platforms such as virtual machines (e.g. Java or Flash), or software platforms such as browsers or even further Facebook, etc.
- End-users layer: or the users/players of the games.
Read more about this topic: Video Game Industry
Famous quotes containing the words game, industry and/or chain:
“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“It could not have come down to us so far,
Through the interstices of things ajar
On the long bead chain of repeated birth,
To be a bird while we are men on earth,”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)