University of Hohenheim

The Game Boys' Network: A Network Analysis of the German Digital Games Industry

This study maps the German digital games industry through a social network analysis built on 41 guided expert interviews, 37 with men and 4 with women, conducted in 2010.

• The study is built on 41 guided expert interviews (37 with men, 4 with women) conducted in 2010, and argues that understanding the German digital games industry requires mapping both value-chain actors and political/societal stakeholders such as regulators USK and KJM and trade associations BIU and GAME.
• The contact network comprises 217 actors and 384 relations but is sparse, with an average actor having only about 1.8 connections.
• After filtering to 87 highly connected actors, trade associations emerge as the most central, with GAME ranking highest on in-degree and eigenvector centrality, while developers and distributors act as the principal business partners; the authors caution these rankings largely reflect the ego-based sampling design and should be read as trend indicators rather than definitive hierarchies.