Creative markets center around novelties. Yet how novelty framings of cultural products relate to performance remains equivocal. We address this question by adopting a temporal perspective, theorizing that a novelty framing received as “not close enough” to what the market already offers can function as a liability in the early stages but as an asset in the later stages. Early on, a broad but casual audience often devalues less typical framings due to confusion and uncertainty; over time, however, novelty-seeking enthusiasts re-evaluate these products, enabling them to achieve superior performance—a phenomenon we call the “sleeping beauty effect.” We test our theory in the video game industry, focusing on Steam, the leading digital distribution platform for PC games. Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to analyze game descriptions, we measure the typicality of novelty framing and link it to performance over time. Our findings lend support to the hypotheses and advance our understanding of novelty appreciation, socio-cognitive structures in creative markets, and strategic entrepreneurship.
