Over recent decades, digital games have been trying to find new ways to monetize their player base. The games have evolved from purely premium titles sold as a product, to repeatedly monetized free-to-play games as a service that allow players to spend limitless amount on various microtransactions. However, there are still some oddities present on the gaming market. The case study analyses the digital game Pokémon TCG Live, which does not have any form of direct monetization. The study points out how it corresponds to both the overarching Pokémon franchise, as well as the digital games industry. Its main goal is to identify its core mechanics that are traditionally connected with monetization practices, and find its position on the market in relation to other digital trading card games. Another point of interest for our study is the high level of interconnection between the printed and digital versions of the Pokémon Trading Card Game and how it impacts the online client.
The Chinese market has been an enticing target for digital games producers for quite some time. With an enormous potential player base and the Chinese government opening up to more digital game releases in the country, producing games with demographic and regional restrictions in mind could be seen as a potential boost to sales and revenues.
The ‘jump’ from one console generation to the next is one of the most anticipated events in the world of digital games. The new hardware opens up possibilities to develop games that were not feasible on their predecessors, especially allowing even more convincing visuals.
Among other things, digital games can be considered valuable cultural artefacts, and in their physical form, they are inherently collectable. The study aims to reflect on digital game collecting and investigate the impact it has on the contemporary digital games industry. The current trend we would like to focus on further is the influx of ‘limited-print run’ companies and their products, i.e., small-scale companies that produce physical copies of otherwise digital-only games in a limited quantity or within a limited time frame. The study aims to examine the impact of limited-print game distribution on the digital games market, as well as explore what the emergence of this trend can mean in terms of the current state of the digital games industry from the collectors’ perspective. The study is largely theoretical; the methods of logical reasoning, i.e., analysis, synthesis, specification, comparison and wider generalisation are used to address the given topic. The discussed issues are then interpreted in relation to today’s digital games industry, more specifically to some of its key products.