The Moderating Effect of Game Tester’s Feedbacks on the Relationship between Ambidextrous-Innovative Approach and the Digital Game Market Fit

Digital-game industry, a subset of the creative industry, often faces dynamic market environments (Storz, 2008). Game development firms must develop innovative games constantly to satisfy players'' ever-changing demands to sustain the “product-market fit” for surviving. To realize the innovation, developers often adopt an ambidextrous approach, both the exploration and exploitation (e.g., Gupta, Smith and, Shalley, 2006). Furthermore, the game development teams often rely on game testers’ feedback to improve the developing games. In the literature, however, a debate about the effect of feedbacks on innovation has occurred. Given the popularity of ambidextrous approach and the use of game testers for feedbacks on digital-game development, unfortunately, no study has been devoted to this issue. Based upon a survey of 119 paired samples on digital-game development projects, the results show that “timely” feedback by game testers positively moderates the relationship between the ambidextrous approach and the final game development performance, while “specific” feedback negatively affects the effectiveness of ambidextrous innovation.