Institutional Support or Obstacle? The Rapid InternationalExpansion of Chinese Gaming Firms

Abstract

The rapid development of the creative industry, particularly the mobile gaming industry, has attracted increasing academic attention across different fields as the digitalization era has arrived. Chinese firms, such as Tencent, have become too big to be ignored. Apart from the International Business (IB) studies, the authors of the article “Market Expansion of Domestic Gaming Firms in Shenzhen, China: Dilemma of Globalization and Regionalization” took an institutional approach to look into how multi-scalar institutions in Shenzhen, China have impacted the development path of the industry. By connecting the concept of Global Production Network (GPN) and the ideas of technological and market gaps in the market expansion of the creative industry, the authors argued that while the protective multi-scalar institutional environment helped the emergence and dominance of the Chinese gaming firms in the domestic market, the firms have been still struggled to expand the market globally. Through this commentary, the importance of the multi-scalar institutional settings, the extra-regional assets, and the marketing capability in the development and expansion of an industry, which has been sometimes understudied, will be introduced and discussed.