ABSTRACT
With a focus on the German video game industry, this chapter highlights international game development communities to consider the relative vitality of local game economies and the negotiations that independent studios have to make with multinational hardware, software and middleware developers. This chapter studies the conditions for sustainable regional and national game economies within global flows, and in particular the technologies that organize this work. This is a situated analysis of both game technologies and game workers that considers the social, cultural, economic and vocational supports for video game production. This chapter is built from a series of conversations with independent game developers, entrepreneurial technologists, and the sizable development teams at larger studios. The main line of inquiry is focused on the decisions that drive software development and engine adoption, and the distinct impact of engine choice and versioning on programmers, artists and other stakeholders.
