Video games can be examined through many lenses, but one should not forget the fact that video gaming is an industry. Many works focus on this aspect of video games or provide perspectives on the business issues faced by companies and creators.
Although focusing on many historical aspects of the video game industry, Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, provides valuable perspectives on early video game systems in terms of intellectual property, law, and business. In addition to examining costs and challenges in early systems and arcade machines, the book includes an appendix describing an early patent battle, in so doing shedding light on many legal and licensing conflicts from the industry’s early days.
Blake Harris’s Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation describes the technological, legal, and design battles that went on behind the scenes for later generations, i.e., those who grew up playing home video games in the 1980s and 1990s. Harris’s narrative reveals the intense competition within this industry.
Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry, by Jason Schrier—who is referenced earlier in this essay as the author of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels—illustrates that the video game industry is not without closures, failures, and toxic work environments. Schrier examines the closures of game studios and the impact of the failures on the careers of those who work within such a volatile system.
In the growing field of electronic sports (known as esports), players themselves often cross from being consumers to being competitors. Although games and gaming competitions often have strong fan-driven communities, many players and teams become part of the esports industry, which offers large awards, television competitions, and the prestige that comes with being the best at competitive games such as Starcraft and Fortnite. A good recent overview of this industry is Global eSports: Transformation of Cultural Perceptions of Competitive Gaming, edited by Dal Yong Jin. This volume covers the historic growth of competitive gaming, as an industry and media component that has grown in tandem with the games themselves. The book includes a review of the literature of esports but it does not explore in depth the growth of competitive mobile gaming or the truly global scale of esports competition.