Participate, share, and create. Understanding the creative community in Dutch video game industry

The game industry plays an increasingly important role in the country's economic development and cultural soft power as it grows. The Dutch game industry is developing steadfastly in its way in several aspects. With more and more new companies being founded and new practitioners being added to the Dutch game industry, how to build a more communicative and connected industry community has become an important topic. A well-connected community has obvious benefits such as enhancing knowledge exchange, generating new ideas, and increasing talent mobility. In addition, a strong industrial community can be used to strengthen lobbying power to influence how the policy regarding the game industry is designated. However, there is scarcity of research on the Dutch gaming industry community. Therefore, in order to fill the gap in this field, this article explored the following research questions: How do Dutch video game practitioners perceive the Dutch video game industry creative community? To answer this question, this study used in-depth interviews to collect data from a total of 10 participants working in the game industry. After the thematic analysis, some very interesting results were obtained. The most prominent comments from Dutch game industry players about the community are openness and looseness. The openness is mainly reflected in the strong willingness of Dutch game industry players to share, especially in the communication between individuals and small groups. On the other hand, the looseness is reflected in the fact that such good communication between individuals can hardly be replicated on a larger scale. The Dutch game industry is currently full of small studios, indie developers, and different sectors with different development outlooks, directly or indirectly leading to a loose community. In addition to this, interviewees mentioned other aspects that are likely to impact the future development of industrial communities, including the operation of industry bodies, entrepreneurship, internationalization, and clustering. It is exciting to see that more and more organizations and industry bodies are making attempts to address these issues and primary results are being achieved. There are many reasons to believe that the Dutch gaming industry and its community will become even more consolidated in the future.