Who Needs a Publisher … or a Retailer or a Marketer?

Today, engineering and media cultures do indeed combine in entertainment computing productions. A shared culture has emerged. All day long, team members at all levels make judgments that are both inherently technical and creative. Technology largely enabled this cultural shift from the early 1990s to today, with the analog media formats all becoming digital and the space for interactivity now being explored. All this shows that what seem to be unassailable, even logical, barriers between cultures in the present do change over time. Technology typically sparks these changes, and those who perceive them can seize such opportunities. Just as remembering how compartmentalized engineering and art cultures once were is difficult, today it is hard to imagine the next big decompartmentalization: the coming cultural shift in which individual creators, the engineers and artists who actually build digital content, will be more intertwined in the realm of business and the monetization of their work.