Digital platforms as drivers of high-tech entrepreneurship? Dynamics, challenges, and opportunities in the game industry

Digital platforms lower barriers to entrepreneurship by providing access to technologies, distribution, and global markets. Limited extant research has examined whether platform participation enables ventures to scale sustainably, and under what conditions platforms enable high-tech industry development in smaller or peripheral regions. This thesis analyzes these questions through the Dutch game industry. Empirically, the research combines a longitudinal dataset on Dutch game developers that tracks firm activity over time, survival, and collaboration patterns, along with interviews with entrepreneurs, publishers, policymakers, and industry experts. The findings show that platforms broaden entry and enable early experimentation, but they do not remove the structural constraints that shape long-term outcomes. As platform markets mature, competition intensifies and advantages accrue to game developers that build capabilities and internationally connected networks that ensure visibility in saturated markets. Despite expectations of disintermediation, intermediaries remain pivotal: commercialization expertise, market access, and global reach have remained largely concentrated in established publishers, sustaining cross-border dependencies and reinforcing spatial inequality. The thesis further finds that generative AI is adopted unevenly and incrementally, with adoption strategies shaped by firm size, resources, and concerns about quality and ethics. These findings suggest that platform participation modestly democratizes entry but is insufficient to produce self-sustaining high-tech industries without the development of complementary assets and capabilities at the firm-level, supportive institutions, and globally connected intermediaries within the territory.