A Phylogenetic classification of the video-game industry’s business model ecosystem

Business Models have acquired substantial momentum in academic literature and have emerged as a new unit of analysis. Although the opinions in contemporary literature regarding what exactly constitutes a business model seem to diverge, this has not prevented both scholars and practitioners positioning the concept as a focal point of industrial classification. The majority of the classification approaches, usually two-dimensional typologies, are directed towards specific industries, such as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, information and communication and e-businesses. The aforementioned industries are characterised by rapid growth rates, are technologically intensive and highly volatile which emphasises the ability of the Business Models to capture the multidimensionality and complexity of such industries. In our research we aim to bridge the gap between typologies and taxonomies of business models by developing a classification framework that is based on the biological school of systematics, namely cladistics classification. We map the evolutionary trajectory of the industry's business model archetypes and employ them as the building blocks for providing a typology of the industrial business model structure based on business model framework. This first step of exploratory work aims to develop a framework that will allow the development of a set of performance measures for the industry and encourage meaningful comparative analyses.