Value Co-Creation: Multiplayer

Sammanfattning: This study is an initial attempt to investigate value co-creation in the gaming industry by looking at Value Co-Creation through a framework called The Value Co-Creation Egg. The aim of the framework was to identify the mechanisms of The Consumer and The Company, which ultimately led to a deeper understanding of how these actors operate within the context of The Market. To understand The Consumer, it was essential to understand how online gaming communities co-create value. Subsequently, to understand The Company, it was necessary to understand how gaming companies facilitate value co-creation. Data for this research was collected by conducting a netnographic study on online gaming communities of four different games; (i) Fornite (ii) World of Warcraft (iii) EVE Online and (iv) Playerunknown’s Battleground, across three different online platforms; (i) Official forums (ii) Official Facebook pages and (iii) Third-party forums. A total of 248 posts were gathered and 3337 comments were observed, over a period of 10 weeks. Subsequently, this data was categorised per the actors of The Value Co-Creation Egg: The Consumer and The Company. The results of this research show that the mechanisms of The Consumer were identified to be helping each other and sharing expertise and knowledge. While those of The Company were, the incorporation of player feedback, the encouragement and recognition of UGC and the creation of dedicated forums and sub-forums. The identification of these mechanisms led to an analysis of how they affected The Market. The analysis shows that (i) dialogue and (ii) User-generated Content were the most dominant patterns identified within The Market. Furthermore, it revealed that these two were interconnected and very much reliant on one another.