Knowledge Management Start or Game over

• Introduction

Among plentiful burgeoning Internet enterprises, game companies are special. Different from material products, game developers provide services entertaining people. As part of postmodern subculture and social soft power, game companies, together with their new industry ecology, require new management methods especially knowledge management to deal with the intangible traits of their virtual service. This article will discuss knowledge management in game companies in four aspects:leadership and organizational structure, culture, human resource and marketing

• Organizational Leadership and Structure Transformation

Game companies attach importance to organizational leadership and structure transformation. Walczak argued that knowledge management including organizational structure optimizing will bring competitive edge to a company and lay solid foundation for corporate culture establishment (2005). Riot Games, for example, adopts a “horizontal management”, which means a flattening organizational structure with less managers and the underlining of equality. Realizing that the best ideas come from grass-root staff, every Riot employee has discretion about game development and improvement via a knowledge sharing platform connecting to corporate intranet. Riot also sets up a team named “Player Dynamic” which studies player behavioristics and user portrait.

Similarly, Blizzard Entertainment motivates a equal knowledge sharing and learning atmosphere. Blizzard has special team to manage intra-knowledge database and social e-platform for know-how exchange. Supercell separates game operation groups into tiny teams, each of which is responsible for one game product. This strategy enables employees to have jurisdiction over program design and creates open and equal working environment where knowledge sharing and rapid decision making is feasible.

• Corporate Culture

Corporate culture is another way that game companies use to apply knowledge management as soon as organizational transformation starts. Different from other Internet companies that emphasize technology, a game relies on cultural discourse to exist. According to the survey of Hewner and Guzdial, culture fit is top priority among employees while programming capacity like C++ can even be learned on the job (2010). For example, Mihoyo, a Chinese subcultural game company with slogan “TECH OTAKUS[1] SAVE THE WORLD”, demands its employees to know well about ACGN culture because its game products have the same settings. Only when Mihoyo employees be familiar with the ACGN culture that the company advocates can they produce perfect content brainstorms and technological masterpieces. Actually, corporate culture priority strategy isn’t a hurdle to technology development. It is pointed out that successful organizational culture fosters knowledge management, which helps build trust, encourage innovation and technology development (Lam et al. 2021). Based on this recognition, Mihoyo begins to filter employees adapted to ACGN from the very point of job interview; therefore, Mihoyo’s Z-generation oriented corporate culture has strong centripetal force which wins its workers’ trust, making this company tower over its peers in ACGN detail depicting, game plot planning, CG animation producing and software and hardware stability.

• Human Resource Management

Human resource management plays key role in game companies’ knowledge management. Afiouni concludes that human resource activities help increase the knowledge and skills of employees, promote corporate interaction and knowledge sharing, which in turn drives organizational performance. (2007). Electronic Arts commits to a diverse and inclusive working environment. The company actively recruits and develops employees from diverse backgrounds and cultures to promote gaming innovation and creativity. EA also offers a variety of employee benefits and resources to support employees’ work-life balance.

Ubisoft, on the one hand, provides a wide range of internal corporate training courses and resources to help employees continuously upgrade their skills and knowledge and support their gaming career development. On the other hand, Ubisoft encourages employees to participate in the gaming community and connect with players to better understand the needs of the game which keeps them exposed to external knowledge. The fusion of internal and external knowledge boosts employees’ specialty literacy and skyrockets the company’s revenue.

• Marketing

Lastly, many game companies use knowledge management to improve marketing effect. As is mentioned, with the shift from mass marketing to “one-to-one” marketing, the systematic application of data mining technology can strengthen the knowledge management process, make the marketing personnel know more about customers, and provide better services for them (Shaw et al. 2001). Epic Games is best known for its successful game Fortnite, which has a marketing strategy that focuses heavily on social media, online activities and in-game activities. The company tracks player feedback and data through knowledge management to continually improve game contents and promotions to ensure they meet players’ needs. Tencent Games is one of the largest gaming companies in the world, and its marketing strategy emphasizes the use of data mining for personalization in different markets. The company uses knowledge management to analyze and understand the needs of various regions and audiences in order to adapt to the characteristics of different cultures and markets.

• Conclusion

In conclusion, game companies use knowledge management in four aspects. Game companies often build more flexible, open and expression-free organizational structure to make best use of knowledge; game companies use special corporate cultures to enhance technological innovation; game companies rely on human resource knowledge management to tap the potential of employee; connecting data mining to corporate knowledge management framework allows game companies to achieve higher sales targets. No matter how novel this industry is, game companies are using knowledge management to be beyond compare and annotate their own stories.

• Reference

[1] Afiouni, F. (2007). Human resource management and knowledge management: a road map toward improving organizational performance. Journal of American Academy of Business, 11(2), 124-130.

[2] Hewner, M., & Guzdial, M. (2010). What game developers look for in a new graduate: interviews and surveys at one game company. The 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education,275-279.

[3] Lam, L., Nguyen, P., Le, N., & Tran, K. (2021). The relation among organizational culture, knowledge management, and innovation capability: Its implication for open innovation. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 7(1), 1-16.

[4] Shaw, M. J., Subramaniam, C., Tan, G. W., & Welge, M. E. (2001). Knowledge management and data mining for marketing. Decision support systems, 31(1), 127-137.

[5] Walczak, S. (2005). Organizational knowledge management structure. The learning organization, 12(4), 330-339.

[1] Otakus, a word from Japanese refers in particular to those who have wide interests in subcultures like ACGN.