A couple good comments here, but I'll add my $0.02.

Video game programmers often need to be very deep generalists. It's a combination of 1) the reality of small teams working on ambitious games, 2) increased expectations for what a videogame can do by default ("what do you mean I can't join a party with my friends?!"), and 3) video games are deeply, deeply bespoke software, and to implement one feature means you need to know the limitations of many subsystems.

A good friend of mine works on the World of Warcraft gameplay development team. They have ~50 engineers, and they're almost all full-stack to some degree. He said that when he was an intern on the team, to build a feature he needed working knowledge of:

1. Blizzard's battle.net network layer

2. The way textures were rendered onto character models, pixel-by-pixel

3. The intricacies of their in-house Lua engine and parser

4. The way that NPC AI was written

None of these requirements, by themselves, are too crazy; but he was using all of these, every day, as a junior in college!

And that was for a three-sprint project! As an intern!

I had a chat on the topic with a game dev. Essentially, the argument was that games tend to have original UI and interaction models. For example, a web dev can get away with a <Button /> and a CSS/JS framework and make spectacular UI but when it comes to games the creatives would demand that button to be designed to match games concept, therefore for a game dev to build a button it may require to deal with all the styling and button states that a web dev would never touch(because it is taken care by the browser or the UI library).

An average game dev would have much deeper knowledge on the stuff they do than the average dev that build corporate software since the game devs would de bespoke work every time. Sure, they also have assets etc. but in the gaming the originality is much more important since the product itself is meant to be enjoyable, not simply a medium to accomplish something else(like ordering pizza or keep track of payments).

So a game dev would need to do something that a front end dev wouldn't have to do. OK, I'm sure the front end dev has to deal with a lot of things the game dev doesn't need to touch.

>OK, I'm sure the front end dev has to deal with a lot of things the game dev doesn't need to touch

Yep, like NPM and various dependency hells. Maybe that's where the compensation difference comes from?

Skim through some Handmade Hero: https://www.youtube.com/c/MollyRocket/videos

Large breadth of content with lots of esoteric and domain specific knowledge sprinkled throughout. The higher level abstractions available are very limited in scope in comparison to say GUI toolkits, most of the success has come from people drilling down and putting in a ton of work.

I do data science for a job and game dev as a hobby. When all is said and done, I don't know if it's really that much harder. But game dev products must run fast, might need to run efficiently over a network, almost inevitably has tons of unique stateful objects whose interactions can cause something to cease being fun, and that sucks.

IME they're roughly equal in terms of raw skill and experience required to publish a finished product. Its a bit apples to oranges however, there are some things in developing video games that are much more difficult than what I've experienced in non-game programming. A lot of it depends on the complexity of what you're making - you can make games that require almost no programming whatsoever, but some games require a great deal of technical skill to program. For instance, running a large-scale multiplayer game isn't so different from managing a large-scale web business.

Thanks for sharing first hand experience. So basically, "it depends".

Depending on the game, you might need to do some machine learning programming.

Forza heavily uses ML. You have Network programming, in there. Well I'm sure some specialties exist which are more difficult, it doesn't change the fact of video game programmer can make half as less as a normal business programer.

ML and network programming can be found outside of video games.

> I'm sure some specialties exist which are more difficult

OK, so we agree. Video game programming can definitely be very tricky, but it's like any other specialties once you reach a certain threshold of sophistication/scale/whatever.

In addition, real-time systems, graphics programming, modelling, and more.

But usually these are 3 different jobs done by 3 different people.

Depends on the shop.

I've seen video game studios which essentially have a single wunderkind who has to dabble in everything because no one else reaches his or her skill level. No other industry has low pay and crunch

Just like some companies in different industries where some dev need to understand design, front end, backend, database, QA, devops, etc.

> No other industry has low pay and crunch

I wasn't talking about the workload or low salaries. I was talking about the statement that "video game programming" as a discipline is the most difficult of all.

If someone's going to offer me $150,000 to do a job, I'm going to find it much easier than if I'm only offered $75,000.

And plus I started my statement with "I find" , if you happen to program quantum systems and that's 10 times as difficult compared to writing a game engine in CPP, that's cool