It is this time of year again, no not Christmas or Hogmanay (yet), but the winter graduation season at the University of Glasgow. On 3rd December it was the turn of the School of Law graduates to head into the Bute Hall to pick their well-earned diplomas. Members of the CREATe team were happy to partake in the celebrations and to raise a glass of bubbly to our excellent LLM students and a newly conferred Doctor of Laws during a small gathering in the CREATe Hub.
Since 2021, CREATe offers authors of excellent postgraduate research an opportunity to publish their LLM dissertations in the CREATe Working Papers series. The ‘Outstanding LLM Dissertations’ allow us to showcase the best work of our LLM students, reward their efforts, and inspire our new students when preparing their own dissertations in the future.
To mark the fifth anniversary of the Outstanding LLM Dissertations initiative we have decided to consider not only the work of the LLM In Intellectual Property & Digital Economy students, but also that of the LLM in International Competition Law & Policy graduates when making our selection. This addition represents the widening scope of CREATe’s research and the growing variety of programmes we offer to the School of Law students. Addressing the increasingly complex dynamics between creativity, markets and technology requires an interdisciplinary approach, informed by a wide array of regulatory fields. And this is what drives our teaching and supervision of master dissertation projects.
Following nominations by the LLM supervisors, the CREATe teaching team selected a dissertation by Sebastian Martin on ‘Critical Hit to Innovation: Why Competition Law Must Embrace Creativity in Gaming’ to be published in CREATe Working Paper series in 2025. We are excited to bring Seb’s work to the wider academic community – you can read the abstract and access the full text below.
In our celebrations at CREATe offices we were joined by the alumni of CopyrightX, an affiliated Harvard Law School course, which allows our IP LLM students to deepen their understanding of US copyright law. Students received their diplomas and warmest congratulations from the CREATe team.
Last but not least, we were happy to see our CREATe colleague, Aline Iramina awarded a doctorate in law based on her thesis ‘Copyright Governance of Algorithms: Towards a More Transparent Regime‘. Aline has been a part of the CREATe team since 2020, first as a doctoral student working under the supervision of prof. Martin Kretschmer and Dr Elena Cooper and a CREATe intern, and now as a Lecturer in Law.
Many congratulations to Sebastian, Aline and the CopyX alumni!
Click on image to download.
Critical Hit to Innovation: Why Competition Law Must Embrace Creativity in Gaming
Sebastian Martin
CREATe Working Paper 2025/11
Abstract
This paper critically examines competition law’s current approach to innovation in the video gaming industry, arguing that its prevailing one-dimensional, outcome-focused framework – typically measured through R&D expenditure, patent activity, and content output – fails to capture the dynamics that genuinely promote competition and deliver value to gamers. It contends that the diversity, quality, and direction of innovation are equally important, and that these are best understood by accounting for the creativity and processes that underpin the sector. This is achieved by distinguishing between ‘innovation’ as the commercial implementation of novel products or methods, and ‘creativity’ as the original, often smaller, collaborative, and iterative processes that give rise to them, frequently driven by smaller competitors and users. This paper advances a ‘creativity lens’, incorporating creativity as a parameter of competition alongside traditional innovation metrics. This framework emphasises the openness, autonomy, and diversity of the creative processes through which games are made, modified, and distributed, prioritising the meaningful participation of users and indie studios. Applying a creativity lens to the Microsoft/Activision Blizzard merger demonstrates how an outcome-based focus overlooked harms to user creativity and indie studio innovation, particularly in the context of cloud gaming. This paper concludes that recognising creativity as a competitive factor better safeguards gamer welfare and fosters more meaningful, long-term innovation in the industry.
Full paper can be downloaded here.