Walled Gardens versus the Wild West

Change, rapid and unpredictable, has come to videogames. Now a battlefield of competing business models, the videogame industry is undergoing a shift to digitization that will profoundly affect how the interactive entertainment business works. Games and interactive media stand at the forefront of a content revolution that will redefine how games are developed and marketed. To understand this complex and rapidly moving transformation, we need a frame of reference, a salient example: console gaming. Console games - the largest, flashiest, and highest-profile segment of the game industry - provide a frame of reference for understanding this complex and rapidly moving transformation. The business model behind console gaming consists of a large marketplace controlled by only a few gatekeepers. Known in the media world as a walled garden, this type of system lets a service provider create monopolistic controls over its company's content.