Strategic timing of entry: evidence from video games

Abstract

Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW. ABSTRACT This paper investigates how video game publishers' choice of game release date is affected by the expected level of competition within the game's product niche. We identify game niches by genre, age-appropriateness, a four week window cohort, publisher and console system. Our analysis is based on two different video game data sets, one based on industry sales data and the other featuring extensive consumer usage information. We show that consumer substitution across games is stronger within most of the dimensions describing product niches. Sales volumes decay quickly after the opening weekend, so at any point in time, a niche will typically be served by few current titles. Thus, publishers have incentives to avoid releasing during periods of fierce intra-niche competition. We show that games are more likely to be released so as to avoid weeks when their niche is relatively well served.

Strategic Promotion and Release Decisions for Cultural Goods

“…As for other cultural goods, we only found one paper that relates to our analysis. Engelstätter and Ward (2013) study the strategic release decisions of video game publishers. The results of their empirical analysis suggest that publishers adjust the release dates of their games so as to avoid weeks where competition within their niche is strong.…”

“…However, if producer j releases its good in the same period, the ex post probability that consumers will decide to consume good i is given by h (1 + b i − βb j ). 16 That is, by raising its budget (b j ), producer j makes it less likely that good i will be chosen. 17 The influence of the other producer's budget depends on the noted by Vanderhart and Wiggins (2001), the advertising campaign starts before the movie release date and culminates at the time the movie is released.…”

Economies of scope in artists’ incubator projects

“…Of these ten articles, one concerns visual art but applies to international art trade not to incubators (Schulze 1999). Two study television (Doyle 2000;van der Wurff 2005), one studies recorded music (Montoro-Pons and Cuadrado-García 2018), one focuses on libraries (Locher 2005), one covers video games (Engelstätter and Ward 2018), and four focus on theatres, symphonies, and other performing arts venues 2 Baumol and Bowen's "cost disease" has been studied contextually given its formative impact on the study of arts administration (e.g., Besharov 2005;Towse 1997). The theory has also been investigated critically, notably in a 1996 plenary of the marking the 30th anniversary of Baumol and Bowen's work, which took place as part of the Ninth Annual Conference on Cultural Economics and which was memorialized in a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economics (Blaug 1996).…”

The Impact of Strategic Core-Component Reuse on Product Life Cycles

“…From an economic point of view, the development of entertainment products such as mobile games is very costly and time-consuming (Clement et al 2006;Folmer 2007;Engelstätter and Ward 2018). However, at the same time, entertainment products such as games have a relatively short product life cycle (Calantone et al 2010;Zhu and Zhang 2010) and suffer from monotonically decreasing popularity over time (Yi et al 2019).…”