It's mainly because of the history of VFX tools and pipelines. A lot of game studios adopted tools from ILM and Pixar. One of the first notable presentation on

It's mainly because of the history of VFX tools and pipelines. A lot of game studios adopted tools from ILM and Pixar. One of the first notable presentation on compositing must be from the 1984 SIGGRAPH held by Porter and Duff. They both went and implemented a node based workflow through the whole pipeline at ILM and later at Pixar. Visual Programming also is a lower barrier of entry, at VFX and Game Studios artist need to proficient in the underlying architecture to get optimal performance and visual fidelity it's easier to give them tools like node base shaders or blueprints instead of code. Most visual programming is also realtime which makes it a lot easier to understand for non programmers. https://keithp.com/~keithp/porterduff/p253-porter.pdf https://keithp.com/~keithp/porterduff/p253-porter.pdf