Brand negotiations in Video Game Communities - An exploratory study analysing community-made discourses in video game brands and how they shape the brand image

Sammanfattning: Video games are engaging products with large followings engaging in their brands. Despite this, video game value has proven hard to research and the area is understudied (Boyle et al., 2012). During the years many games have come and gone, some being hailed by their dedicated communities while others get shunned by the gaming community (MacDonald, 2018). This tells a story that the gaming community has a very influential role in the negotiating the game brands, but this subject has received little attention in research. Therefore, this thesis provides an exploratory study on the online brand community of the video game Europa Universalis 4 with the goal to visualize the brand negotiation process taking place in its online brand community. The study identifies that consumers in the brand community actively govern the brand based on the value they derive from the game through social practices. When articulations about the game value are reproduced by a large enough part of the community, it starts to become a naturalized way of speaking about the brand, it becomes a discourse. In the studied case, the consumers first praises the brand upon release, and the almost unison heralding of the deep game experience create an evangelizing discourse, where a naturalized way of speaking about the game as a great experience is adopted in the community. After some years, the ever-increasing amount of paid-for expansions start to create a negative sentiment within the community, laying the foundations for a negative discourse of exploitation. As time goes on and more content is added, the opinions from the community about them feeling exploited grows stronger, ultimately clashing with the discourse of evangelizing, thus actively renegotiating the brand image with values from both discourses. The discourses are found to inscribe the brands with values and narratives that help consumers make sense of the brand, and the power struggle between them lets consumers make sense of what the brand stands for. The results point to the importance the community has in shaping the brand image of video games, and brand managers must be very cautious about how pricing strategies influence the brand in this setting. It also shows the role the brand community has in acting as a reactive feedback mechanism for the brand. In this setting, it is through the active scrutiny by community members that changes in the brand become enchanted in the brand image and seemingly adds to the dynamism of the brand as interface.