a book by Pierre-Jean Benghozi and Philippe Chantepie

At the turn of the century, video games emerged as a major sector alongside traditional cultural industries such as book publishing, recorded music, cinema and television. Relying on an anthropological point of view and driven by a wave of technological innovations, the playful practice has been renewed in a few decades to adapt to new terminals, from the living room console to the mobile phone. Video games have become ubiquitous.

The economy of this industry remains poorly known, still little explored. This book proposes an overview of the sector. It makes it possible to understand how and by which actors the video games are conceived, produced and disseminated, what are the issues specific to this globalized sector (network effects, Internet, importance of fixed costs, rapid renewal of terminals, weight of communities , globalization, etc.) and how they are deployed on different continents.

By reinventing all the links of the cultural industries - the processes of creation, production, distribution and monetization - by developing from the outset on a global scale, the video game industry is thus a reflection of technical transformations, industrial, economic, driven by the digital revolution as much as it becomes a possible horizon of cultural industries.

By their global, global and omnipresent dimension, could video games be established as the cultural industry of the twenty-first century?

A coedition by the ministère de la culture et the presses de Science-Po.

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