Capacity Limits of the U.S. Video Game Market for PRC Products

Chinese video game industry has experienced a significant leap in recent years — revenue of the Chinese mobile gaming sector has multiplied several times over, Chinese game Genshin Impact has received numerous nominations and awards, including Western awards ceremonies and has one of the largest video game companies in the world nowadays — Tencent. For China, the United States market is one of the largest overseas markets in terms of revenue, attracting additional attention among individuals working in the gaming industry and modern media. This paper utilizes the Theory of Constraints to identify constraints that are exclusive to Chinese video game studios and their products delivered in the United States market. The study examines the identified capacity constraints in terms of their impact on the throughput of games created by Chinese companies, where throughput includes both game revenue and time spent on game production. Throughout the research process, three main interconnected groups of constraints were identified — lack of market constraints, policy constraints, and resource constraints — and several constraints within each group were analyzed, totaling more than 10 constraints overall. Relationships between the identified constraints and their impact on throughput were discovered and visualized in an augmented Visual Steam Mapping (VSM) model tailored for the video game business and the objectives of our research. Capacity constraints influence the throughput of Chinese video games as bottlenecks, preventing the maximization of profit due to direct and indirect parameters and increasing game development time.