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1. Introduction
Game development organizations can be generally characterized as specialized software development organizations (Kanode and Haddad, 2009; Blow, 2004). Both game development and software development share several features, such as programming work, design and testing practices, but game development includes also a bigger portion of creative work, similar to what can be found in music and movie industry (Blow, 2004). Computer games are also intangible products (Rus and Lindvall, 2002) that means, for example, that companies have no high starting cost but people can start a “hobby project” that can lead to serious business if considered suitable; the most important resource of a computer game organization is the intellectual capital (Vanhala and Kasurinen, 2014).
The game industry has been on a growing trend for the last ten years despite economic downturns. For example in the USA and in Finland the number of new game companies and amount of money involved in the industry has been growing. The increase in the sector also means increase in employment. To understand what sort of knowledge is useful for the industry, the needs of the games industry have been previously studied, for example from the perspective of compatibility between academic programs and industry expectations (McGill, 2009; Kasurinen et al., 2013). The industry is still young and research is required on various areas.
In this paper we study growing computer game organizations and their means of building a growing and successful organization from the perspective of competences as we consider the current literature lack of studies of this kind. We study organizations in different phases of growth and analyze what core competences these organizations have and what types of skills and expertise they need for their growth. To achieve this objective, we interviewed 34 professional game developers in 11 game development organizations. During the data collection, we interviewed several stakeholders such as game designers, developers, project managers and upper management. Additionally, we held a separate interview round on startup companies with the company founders to gain a comprehensive view into game startups and to understand what the main problems related to their competences are. This led to the formation of two research questions:
RQ1. “How do computer game organizations grow from an idea to a profitable company?”
RQ2.