Multi-homing in ecosystems and firm performance: Does it improve software companies' ROA?

Joining or leaving a platform ecosystem is a crucial strategic decision for a software producing organization. Multi-homing is strategy where a company participate more than one platform ecosystem. A decision to multi-home entails considerable impact for companies, as entering into a new ecosystem always requires investments in, e.g., developing, maintaining and marketing a platform specific extension. While a costly decision, it also opens new markets in domains where customers seldom multi-home, i.e., it is a reliable way to address new markets. Multi-homing strategies are infrequently addressed topic in the literature and their impacts on the performance of the companies are rarely analyzed. In this paper, we study how the decision to multi-home a ects to the performance of Finnish game companies. Our results question previous assumptions that multi-homing has a positive impact on firm performance, as our study finds is unable to find support for the di erences in performance for single- or multi-homing companies. This might be due to a development in which it is a norm in the market is to publish simultaneously for all ecosystem in order to consolidate their position in the market.