What Makes a Video Game Hit? An Empirical Investigation of Three Console Platforms

The video game industry is a branch of the entertainment sector that is of growing cultural and economic relevance. Some video games these days are now produced and marketed with budgets of more than 200m US$ and earn more than a billion US$. Nevertheless, little is known about the factors that make a video game a hit. Building on previous findings in adjacent industries such as the movie industry, the authors develop hypotheses about success factors and test them empirically with a large data set (2,429 cases from 2005 to 2011) of the video game industry.