[nadam]

"compare this with enterprise software, which is orders of magnitude more complex than video games in terms of business logic" Maybe this was true 20 years ago, but I do not think this is true today. Game code of some games is almost as complex as enterprise software or even more complex in some cases (think of grand strategy games like Civilization or Paradox games). The difference is that it still needs to be performant, so the evolutionary force just kills programmers and companies creating unperformant abstractions. In my opinion game programming is just harder than enterprise programming if we speak about complex games. (I have done both). The only thing which is easier in game programming is that it is a bit easier to see clearly in terms of 'business requirements', and also it is more meritocratic (you can start a game company anywhere on the globe, no need to be at business centers.) And of course game programming is more fun, so programmers do the harder job even for less money.

For people who think game programming is less complex than enterprise software, I suggest the CharacterMovementComponent class in unreal engine which is the logic of movement of characters (people) in a networked game environment... With multiple thousand lines of code in just the header is not uncommon in unreal. And this is not complex because of optimization mostly. This is very complex and messy logic. Of course we can argue that networking and physics could be done in a simple naive way, which would be unacceptable in terms of latency and throughput, so all in all complexity is because of optimization after all. But it is not the 'fun' elegant kind of optimization, it is close to messy enterprise software in some sense in my opinion.

[ykonstant]

I have heard modern game development compared to OS development in terms of complexity and I think that comparison is quite apt; especially when the game involves intricate graphics and complicated networking involving multiple time scales as you say.