Video Games Production Models in Spain

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the activity of the Spanish video games development companies in order to categorize them in different groups. We will evaluate the state of the Spanish production and we will try to discover business trends. Even if there’s not just one management system, we think that the common dynamics of many companies allow including them in few production models. Currently there are 330 active development studios in Spain. We can conclude that the Spanish video game production is rising. The Spanish industry of the video game is fullly integrated inside the global structures in the industry: the strongly oligopolistic market, dominated by hardware providers and a few international publishers, doesn’t cancel the chance of creation from independent producers. In order to reach our objectives, we will study a sample of 35 Spanish video game development studios according to the hardware platform chosen for programming, the intellectual property rights (IP) and the kind of distribution used. The results of this research confirm partially the first hypothesis; we can identify various commons lines of action that, despite the many variations of every model, allow categorizing the sector in three types of companies.