Prolonging the Magic: The Political Economy of the 7th Generation Console Game

Nieborg's paper examines the seventh-generation Triple-A console game as a commodity produced within a capital-intensive, hit-driven, franchise-based industry. Its central thesis is that proprietary hardware, standardized game engines, and platform governance rules push creative production toward the repetition of proven forms, a process it describes through Bill Ryan's concept of "formatting." The analysis is grounded in the industry's material conditions, including the storage disparity between the 7.8 GB DVD limit of the Xbox 360 and the 50 GB Blu-ray discs of the PlayStation 3, as well as Electronic Arts' "fewer, bigger, better" publishing strategy.

The paper's most developed case is Activision's Call of Duty franchise, which it presents as a paradigm of franchise-based commodification. Publishers planned annualized sequels and used "branched serialization," particularly paid map-pack downloadable content, to extend revenue and offset losses from resale and piracy. Modern Warfare 2 is cited as reaching over $550 million in five days and selling 20 million units. From this, the author concludes that such games are best understood as "unfinished commodities," shaped as much by market logic as by ludic design.

The analysis extends to the consequences of these strategies for creative diversity. Through commodification and the two rigid formatting strategies of franchising and branched serialization, the industry is portrayed as standardizing production toward formulaic, risk-averse content, while innovative, minority, and small-studio work is marginalized. Experimentation occurs only within narrow genre boundaries. The paper argues that this economic logic should be openly examined in scholarly discussion rather than treated as an unquestioned assumption.

A final section addresses how platform holders such as Microsoft sustain the value of blockbuster titles through digital distribution and pricing policy, notably Xbox Live's non-refundable "all sales are final" policy. The analysis is deliberately limited to blockbuster titles, excluding digital-only games on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, many produced by independent studios. Within this scope, the paper concludes that such practices help prolong both pricing power and the perceived "magic" of major console releases.