Digital Creativity Drives Game Success and Premium Pricing Dynamics

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-589-8_55How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Digital Creativity; Game Success; Pricing Strategy

Abstract

General Background: The digital gaming industry represents a rapidly expanding sector within the global creative economy, where understanding drivers of market success remains critical. Specific Background: While prior studies have emphasized production, monetization, and innovation, the role of digital creativity in shaping game performance within platform-based ecosystems such as Steam remains underexplored. Knowledge Gap: Limited empirical research examines creativity using behavioral metrics derived from real market data and its relationship with pricing strategies and performance outcomes. Aims: This study investigates how digital creativity and pricing jointly relate to game success using a dataset of 9,455 Steam games. Results: The findings demonstrate that digital creativity, measured through the Digital Creativity Index (DCI), shows a strong positive association with player ratings and engagement, while pricing exhibits only a marginal effect; however, a positive interaction indicates that higher creativity aligns with greater willingness to pay for premium games, supported by clustering results identifying strategic archetypes including Creative Hits, Price-Oriented Performers, and Community Builders. Novelty: This study introduces a behavioral, data-driven measure of digital creativity and integrates innovation-based competitive advantage with signaling theory in a unified empirical framework. Implications: The results provide strategic insights for developers, publishers, and policymakers by highlighting creativity as a key driver of sustainable competitive advantage and value creation in digital game markets.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Inasari Widiyastuti
AU  - Agus Rahayu
AU  - Ratih Hurriyati
AU  - Lili Adi Wibowo
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/18
TI  - Digital Creativity Drives Game Success and Premium Pricing Dynamics
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Communication and Digital Multimedia 2025 (ICCDM 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 683
EP  - 691
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-589-8_55
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-589-8_55
ID  - Widiyastuti2026
ER  -