This article interrogates Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter’s Games of Empire. Since its publication in 2009, the game industry evolved significantly, adding billions of players, dollars, and devices. One of the driving forces of this transformation has been the global diffusion of mobile media. This raises the question: Do mobile platforms and the app stores operated by Apple and Google allow for a radical departure from global hypercapitalism? This question will be explored by taking on three themes: shifts in labor, the political economy of platformization, and the capital-intensive mode of app production and circulation. Doing so addresses two gaps in Games of Empire’s approach: a dearth of empirical economic analysis and the acknowledgment of work in critical platform studies and mainstream economics. It is concluded that rather than providing a staging ground for dissent or collective action, apps of empire signal the foreclosure of an exodus from global hypercapitalism.

本文对Dyer-Witheford和De Peuter的《帝国游戏》进行了审问。自2009年发布以来，游戏产业发展迅猛，增加了数十亿玩家，美元和设备。这种转变的驱动力之一是移动媒体的全球传播。这就提出了一个问题：由苹果和谷歌运营的移动平台和应用商店是否可以从根本上摆脱全球资本主义？这个问题将通过三个主题来探讨：劳动力转移，平台化的政治经济学以及应用程序生产和流通的资本密集型模式。这样做能够解决在两个缺口帝国的游戏“小号方法：缺乏经验经济分析，并且对关键平台研究和主流经济学的工作缺乏认可。得出的结论是，帝国的应用并没有为异议或集体行动提供舞台，而是预示了全球超级资本主义将流亡者拒之门外。