App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store

Abstract

To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.

Nationaløkonomiske og -kulturelle udfordringer for nordiske spilindustrier i en platformkapitalistisk verden

“…2) De distinkte teknologiske og algoritmiske strukturer i moderne digitale platformsdistribution, som former den kultur, der distribueres (Nieborg 2015;Nieborg og Poell 2018). 3) De internationale økonomiske og kulturelle spaendinger mellem dominerende nationer såsom USA og Kina og de mindre Danmark og Norge, hvilket i forskningslitteraturen kaldes 'platformsimperialisme' (Jin 2015;Nieborg, Young, og Joseph 2020;Mirrlees 2019).…”

“…Allerede succesrige spilfirmaer nyder godt af platformes netvaerkseffekter, så nye konkurrenter har svaert ved at opnå markedsandele. Det vil sige, at de allerede etablerede spil på de forskellige digitale distributionsplatforme forbliver dominante (Nieborg, Young, og Joseph 2020;Rietveld, Ploog og Nieborg 2020). Dette gentages af den norske Produsentforeningen, som skriver, at «Det er tøff konkurranse for nye spill og det kan vaere veldig krevende å få god synlighet i forskjellige appstores» (Virke Produsentforeningen 2020, 15).…”

Apps of Empire: Global Capitalism and the App Economy

“…These economic asymmetries extend beyond the platform level and impact national and regional development communities. For example, elsewhere we analyzed the ability of local developers to carve out a space in national instances of Apple’s App Store, in our case, the Canadian instance (Nieborg et al, 2020). One would expect countries with vibrant game industries, such as Australia, Finland, the United Kingdom, and Canada itself, to be able to capture a large share of app-related revenue in Canada’s App Store.…”

“…While the fallout of platform capitalism is addressed by a broad swath of critical scholars, it is important for game scholars to consistently point to the game industry’s history. Digital games have been, and very much still are, the proverbial canary in the capitalist coalmine (Nieborg, Young, & Joseph, 2020) and provide insightful case studies to analyze historical and current instances of “platform-dependent” cultural production (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). For example, the by-now popular freemium or “free-to-play” business model may push technological and economic boundaries; it does so while challenging long-standing (game) design principles and ethical norms (Willson & Leaver, 2015).…”

Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years after Games of Empire

“…Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. This is because existing work has highlighted the inequities of the global game labour market (Kerr, 2017; Ozimek, 2019) now increasingly challenged by unionization, the industry’s contribution to the consolidation of corporate interests (Kerr, 2017) including through the emergence of platforms that turn players into workers and play data into commodities (Joseph, 2017; Whitson, 2019), the commodification and standardization of cultural representation (De Wildt, 2020), the revitalization of white ethnonationalism in game culture (Ismangil, 2019; Jong, 2020), the mutually beneficial but exploitative relation between higher educational institutions and the games industry (Harvey, 2019), and the extension of new forms of colonialism through globalized supply chains and platforms (López López, de Wildt, & Moodie, 2019; Nieborg, Young & Joseph 2020) and the ecological deprivation brought about by the industry’s growth (Chang, 2019; Nguyen, 2017). But it is not only the industry which manifests problematic tendencies but also the discipline of game studies itself, which has tended to privilege certain experiences and viewpoints, notably white, male North American ones (Butt, de Wildt, Kowert, & Sandovar, 2018), and marginalized participation by those who are not in permanent academic employment and in a position to pay large conference fees.…”