
To understand the gaming industry, we need to look at its pipelines. Perhaps, a publishing company like EA, one of the most successful games, is FIFA (in 2019, it comprised 14% of EA total revenues). Some others are developers and publishers (like EA, Activision Blizzard, and Epic Games).įor companies that are publishers but don’t have the hardware, part of the content will be distributed through the pipelines of gaming console companies (like Sony and Microsoft). Some of those companies are also hardware companies, thus building both hardware and software (like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo). However, the market is consolidated around those few key players. Of course, the industry is also comprised of many independent developers and self-publishing companies. Gaming developers’ companies comprise companies like Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Tencent, Epic Games, EA, Activision Blizzard, and a few more. Gaming developers’ and publishing companies The same applies to gaming console companies. Publishing houses both license and develop their own games. For those reasons, many developers go through gaming developer companies or publishers. However, one thing is building a game, another is building and distributing a game that gets noticed.

The route of developing your own game through some of the gaming engines available is usually what indie (independent) creators do. In many other cases, companies that develop games, develop also their own engines. Some of the game engines available comprise Unity, GameMaker, Godot, Unreal and more.Īmong the most used game engines, there are Unreal, Unity, Amazon Lumberyard, and more.

Examples of game engine companies comprise Fortnite’s developing company Epic Games, which not only develops its own games, but it also provides and licenses the game engine ( Unreal), the toolbox for many creators and gaming programmers. Game engines are development frameworks that enable developers to have a set of creative tools to build their own games.

Digital games changed the way games are distributed and sold, and it opened up the way to free-to-play models. While the prevailing business model for decades has been that of selling the console at cost, and make money on games. From game engines, which help developers build their games. The gaming industry, part of the entertainment industry, is comprised of three main types of players.
