User-producer collaboration in a platform-mediated network

This paper aims at contributing to the limited evidence on unpaid competing complementors and on possibly countervailing network effects by asking how a form of creation that is user-driven and not motivated by sales incentives, impacts on producers’ sales. To this goal, the video game industry provides an excellent field of study. In fact, games are suitable platforms for user creativity and the so called practice of modding - the act of modifying an existing hardware or software consumer good - intensely permeates the modern-day game culture (Nieborg and Van der Graaf, 2008; Jeppesen, 2004). Within the user and producer innovation paradigm (Gambardella et al., 2016), mods represent a “user-complemented market”, as they are user-created complements, involving modifications built onto or into producer products, and are diffused peer to peer. Findings show that user-base creation is not self-propelling but it helps videogame producers to attract new users, thus contrasting the natural decline in revenues that characterize entertainment products.