Beyond Broadcast and Social Media: Game Engines are the New Reality Engines

Which partly explains why Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has been widely quoted as saying that he’s more concerned with the competitive risk of massively networked, interactive experiences like Epic Games’s Fortnite than Hulu or HBO Max or any other traditional broadcaster.

In a world awash with information and eye candy, “social gaming” is rapidly evolving as the largest existential threat to legacy media’s claim on engaged consumer attention. Trust and manipulation issues are also causing people to look beyond incumbent social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

This is precisely the arc that we’ve watched immersive entertainment take over the last decade. It has evolved over time to address the shortcomings of the previous incarnations of mass media. It is not that the prior media and social platforms were uninteresting, rather it’s the inevitable rise of new models that better address the shortcomings of... See more