1. What impact does media
ownership have on the
gaming industry?
Tom, Neil, Tom, George and Will

2. Oligopoly
 Majority of the industry is owned by 3 major
corporations – Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo
 Companies take over first party publishers using
vertical integration, an example of this is Microsoft
taking over the failing publisher Bungie and they
now produce the largest grossing Xbox game: Halo.

3. Licenses for games
 The fact that games now need licenses means that
the content can be regulated by the big three
company’s (Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft)
 This essentially means the death of home brew.
Because games require a license it is harder or even
impossible for the average person to develop a
game.
 The big three company’s control the content of
nearly the whole industry as a result of this.

4. Licenses for games
(Censorship)
 The fact that the BBFC have never banned a game
maybe suggests that the big three company’s are
more in charge of regulation.
 We can compare the content of modern games to
the content of some of the games in the homebrew
era and we see that before licensing and regulation
by the bug three company’s the content of games
could be whatever the developer wants, no matter
how dark or porny. An example of this is the game:
‘Pie Man’ in which the user plays as pedophile who
has to abduct children. A game like this would
never be allowed in modern days.

5. The Consumer
 The slow drip of the technology means that the
consumer constantly gets new, better games, for
example when the Xbox was first released Microsoft
told developers that they could only use 20% of the
processing power.
 Another benefit for the consumer is that because it
is an oligopoly consumers only need to buy one
console as most games are made for every console.
 In the homebrew era games designed for specific
consoles and because of this games were made
unavailable for the wider market.

6. Altering games to fit the
market
 Games developed by Overseas
Companies such as Nintendo,
have to alter their games to fit
the market in which it will be
sold, Deepsilver had to do this
on two occasions, once was
when the United States market
was offended by the hanging
man in the Dead Island logo and
another was the European
market offended by the young
girl dying in the teaser trailer,
these are examples of when
game publishers had to alter
their games in order to