Re-shaped by mobile technologies’ disruption: The videogame industry in Turkey

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the business disruption effects of mobile technologies for the videogame industry in Turkey. Previous research shows that before mobile gaming became prevalent globally, the Turkish videogame industry was extremely small and lacked any success stories for either console or PC platforms. The rise in mobile and the so-called “casual” gaming gave the local industry a competitive advantage on a global scale. To capture the nuances of this disruptive transition, we performed structured interviews with gaming industry experts and analyzed prominent discussion forums for primary and secondary data collections, respectively. We especially focused on answering the following questions: (1) how prepared were Turkish videogame development companies in handling the mobile disruptive change; (2) what kind of transformations they experienced in their business plans and practices as a result; (3) how the disruption affected the way they viewed their customer base; and finally (4) what future disruptions they expect in their industry.

Keywords: videogames, digital games, games, mobile, disruption