It is becoming increasingly necessary for the firms to create value not only on their own, but also by collaborating with various firms to form ecosystem in order for companies to maintain sustainable growth.
In this paper, we examine the formation of ecosystem and business model innovation through the case of Japanese game content, which is changing from a traditional platform-based product to a ecosystem-based product. As a result of a time-based analysis of Nintendo's "Animal Crossing" game content series, which became a big hit in 2020, we observed changes in the way ecosystem actors who create business models together interact with each other and in the nature of network externalities.
It was also observed that when existing products change from platform-based to ecosystem-based, the core firm builds a function that serves as a hub for complementary producers to participate in value creation, and creates a new business model using the hub as its own revenue source. The case study in this paper suggests how firms that aim to innovate their products and create new markets should manage their ecosystem when they change the value of their products in digitalization era.
Keywords: platform, ecosystem, business model, game contents
