I think it’s more that the studios used to all be small, and the foundational games of the previous generations were made by newly-formed companies comprised of mostly young people. Today we have established AAA studios with huge bankroll that put their money behind developers with a track record.

One of the issues with this is most of those folks are probably using an engine like Unity or Unreal. Which is fine by itself if you want to make a game, but it kind of forces you into certain constraints while allowing you to not have to understand the underlying tech, as well as the hardware.

To really get into the fundamentals, like computer graphics, pathfinding, collision detection to make something really impressive and never seen before like Teardown (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/), you really need to start from scratch.

And speaking as someone who has written a basic-ish but fully functional (deferred rendering, dynamic lights, shadows, collision detection etc.) engine, it's really not that hard (well compared to making a shipping game), and having a fundamental understanding of the underlying tech will probably help you to make a game that stands out from the crowd.

What instance is that? Would love to follow peoples progress