In this chapter, I will address the way platforms have developed in the field of digital gaming and use this historical backdrop for interrogating critically the notion of platforms. The historical development of gaming platforms can help us to question what should indeed be attributed to the platform as a computational system and what should rather be explained by the platform owner's financial status and position within the wider market context. Traditional game consoles are, in practice, proprietary innovation platforms, in Gawer's (2011) and Cusumano's (2010) sense, a set of development and publishing tools and a key contact point to the gaming audience made available to complementors on certain conditions. As developer and publisher, you must contract with the platform owner to get your game title on the console, and as a gamer, you must purchase the console to be able to play your games. In this way, the gaming consoles of the 1980s and 1990s effectively inserted themselves between game publishers and the gaming audience in the same manner as contemporary platforms are said to do, and their specific design and forms of governance indicate a certain market order, that is, a certain field of incumbents and challengers (see Chapter 3). Their power is that of the traditional book publisher owning the key to a particular version of the book format, which happens to be the market standard. These platforms were a key principle in the consumer game market from the 1980s onwards, and the key distinction of the 1990s game market was not drawn between platformized and non-platformized cultural production (Nieborg and Poell, 2018) but rather between proprietary platforms such as PlayStation and open platforms such as the PC. Accordingly, the 2010s market did not mark a new era of platformization but rather the introduction of a new type of platform and a new integration of platforms and markets.

As Aphra Kerr observes, one key trend in the game market during the past decade has been a further concentration of ownership and market domination by an even smaller number of actors, such as Microsoft, Apple, Tencent, and Google (Kerr, 2017).