ABSTRACT
Game engines are a site of aggressive entrepreneurship; viewed collectively, they are an arena of research and development that is changing the landscape of contemporary visual culture across game and non-game enterprises. Game engine culture has swept up a broad array of clients, among them The Weather Channel, UPS and Walmart. Game engines are central to the data-driven synergies that have emerged across what were once distinct media and information industries. This chapter explores how game engines have moved into a number of vertically integrated market sectors—augmented and virtual reality, film and television, architectural visualization, cloud-based mapping applications and location-based games, such as Pokémon GO—and highlights how, precisely Unity, Unreal and other software frameworks have altered contemporary media production.
