What are the most important companies in the games industry? The answer depends heavily on your interpretation of the question.
One might be tempted to look to the companies with the largest market capitalisation or the largest sales numbers, or perhaps those with the largest active user numbers. Certainly, you could also look to the hardware companies whose innovations underpin the industry’s efforts – the NVIDIAs and AMDs of the world, or perhaps to a lesser extent, the console platform holders.
One other category of company, however, stands out as being vitally important even if not always all that high profile, and that’s the companies which provide the software tools and platforms upon which almost all modern games are now built. In essence, there are two key players here (along with an interesting ecosystem of other players who serve more specific niches) – Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, and Unity’s eponymous engine.