Opening your product: impact of user innovations and their distribution platform on video game success

The focus of this paper is the impact of user innovations on the success of video games. Through the use of secondary data sources, a dataset of 204 video games and their expert and user ratings, user innovation and distribution platform support, as well as the number of available user innovations, is constructed and analyzed. The results highlighted in particular the impact of supporting the main distribution platform for modifications, the Steam Workshop. Hypotheses related to the support of user innovations alone were not supported, but platform support did show a significant positive effect on both number of available user innovations as well as user ratings. The number of user innovations itself did not have an impact on the user ratings.