Title Pending 3890

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Media industry studies has seen a growing body of literature focusing on precarity in the game industry, with recent work highlighting the ways in which platforms contribute to unstable working conditions and practices. Despite the importance of platforms in the cultural industries, more research is needed on the spatial dynamics of platformization and how it impacts the embeddedness of cultural producers in local contexts. This paper focuses on a national case study of The Netherlands to demonstrate how platforms reconfigure the geographies of social and business networks in which game developers are embedded and, in doing so, how platforms exacerbate forms of precarious and contingent work. Using 26 semi-structured interviews with developers, survey data, news articles, and company reports, the research takes a historical approach to understand how platform dynamics have evolved in The Netherlands, and how game developers have responded to increasingly precarious conditions. The research finds that, over time, distribution platforms have disembedded developers from local cultures of production and distribution and reoriented them toward international markets and intermediaries. The disembedding of developers from local contexts is part of a longer trend in the Dutch game industry through which game developers had already become reliant upon transnational publisher and platform companies by the early 2000s. By giving developers the means to surpass publishers, digital distribution has led to an influx of developers entering the industry in the 2000s by lowering barriers to reaching international markets and consumers. At first, this meant that developers in the Netherlands were better able to monetize their games through access to consumers provided by digital distribution platforms. Over time, however, digital distribution has resulted in precarious and uncertain conditions for developers open due to increased competition and financial risk in these markets. In response, developers pursue strategies to embed themselves more firmly both in transnational business networks with platforms and publishers, as well as in local networks to mitigate the impact of uncertainty in platform markets. Strategies oriented at the national or regional level allow some game developers to find alternatives to platform markets related to service provision and business-to-business strategies. These findings suggest that the impact of platforms on precarious work in the game industry is a historical process, tied to processes of (in)formalization in the industry, as well as disruption by digital distribution platforms. The specific trajectory of platformization in The Netherlands has been historically tied first to local networks of distribution, which enabled the emergence of the first game companies. When these opportunities proved to be short-lived, the lack of viable opportunities in the Netherlands pushed game developers toward working with international platforms. At the same time, digital distribution platforms have partially disrupted developer relationships with publishers and have made developers increasingly responsible for risk-taking in the game industry. These findings indicate that the lens of embeddedness can be useful to contextualize experiences of precarity wrought by platformization in specific social and geospatial contexts.