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The purpose of this paper is to focus on user innovation strategies and their stability in the video game industry. The main research questions addressed are whether a significant portion of video game companies employ user innovation, and how these strategies are showing signs of success and evolve over time.

From various online data sources, information was extracted for 2,003 video game companies and 3,923 video games and analyzed using quantitative statistical approaches.

The analysed data show that a significant proportion of video game companies rely on user innovation-related strategies. If user innovation possibilities are provided, user ratings also tend to be higher. Over time, this strategy of enabling user innovation becomes more prevalent, but companies do also abandon such strategies or use them selectively. Especially, never employing them is associated with decreased company lifespan.

This is the first paper providing a large-scale insight into the evolution of user innovation strategies in an industry.