Business models for Serious Games developers - transition from a product centric to a service centric approach

In the context of the serious games industry, up to now the most commonly used business models (BM) among developers representing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) consists in offering an individual product to the customer, based on tailored one-of a kind production. Such production has high costs and low re-usability and leads to a long time-to-market. For an industry dealing with products highly dependent on technological advances, this implies high risks for failure and thus being put out of business. Consequently, an increasing number of Serious Games (SG) developers are struggling to survive. These trends are not specific for the SG development sector, but can actually be observed in several others, like software industry as well as the manufacturing industry, where a transition to less product-oriented BM can be observed. This article analyses first the current use of BM within two application fields of SG, before it presents two examples of a successful transition towards a service oriented BM within the same fields Based on this, it finally discusses the opportunities and the threats of using such BMs for SG developers.