Australian Video Game Developers’ Marketing Knowledge: Filling an Important Research Gap

摘要: There has been a research focus on the production of video games in smaller studios and national video game industries including Australia (Banks and Cunningham, 2016; Keogh, 2021), Germany (Wimmer and Sitnikova, 2012), Norway (Jørgensen, 2019; Jørgensen, Sandqvist and Sotamaa, 2017), Sweden (Jørgensen, Sandqvist and Sotamaa, 2017) and Finland (Jørgensen, Sandqvist and Sotamaa, 2017; Sotamaa, 2021). However, there has been little exploration of the business aspects of video game production, such as marketing activities and knowledge.In general, it is acknowledged the video game industry worldwide lacks mature business, management, and marketing knowledge (Kerr, 2017). However, given the lack of research into the business and marketing aspects of video game production, the actual skills, knowledge, and practices of smaller video game developers remains under researched. If there is indeed a lack of sophisticated knowledge, this is problematic for developers given the crowded video game marketplace. There are over 50,000 games available on Steam with up to 10,000 more added each year (Bailey, 2021). Developers need to market their games effectively to ensure they stand out, which makes marketing a pivotal and core skill for developers who wish to earn a living from their games (Kerr, 2017; Zackariasson and Dymek, 2016).