It's Just A Game, Until You Try To Build One 

It’s hard to overstate how absurdly difficult video game development is. People outside the process, even fans who deeply love games, tend to underestimate just how much work, coordination, and compromise go into the creation of even the most underwhelming title. That’s not because they’re oblivious—it’s because the final product hides the scaffolding. You never see the abandoned systems, the rewrites, the rewires, the tools that had to be custom-built before a single “fun” thing could happen on screen.

Video games are often lumped in with movies as another form of entertainment media, but structurally they have very little in common. A film is linear. Even when it isn’t, it can only ever be watched one way: beginning to end. Games, on the other hand, have to function. They have to respond. A movie doesn’t crash halfway through. A novel doesn’t let the reader walk off the edge of the world. But games—games have to contain logic, the illusion of choice, the constraints of rules, and yet still make room for expression. Every system has to anticipate abuse. Every design decision will be broken by a player in a way the designer didn’t expect. And the machine can’t catch fire when they do it.

Technically, they’re software—meaning they inherit all the complexity of application development. Codebases often span hundreds of thousands or millions of lines. Physics simulations, AI behavior trees, networking, rendering, input systems, UI layers—all interwoven. Teams build their own engines or contort themselves around the limitations of third-party ones. Either way, the tools are only semi-cooperative. Writing game code isn’t just about correctness; it’s about optimization. Every frame, every microsecond counts. You’re not just building a system that works—you’re building one that works fast, under extreme conditions, across platforms with wildly different capabilities.

And yet the technical side, for all its complexity, is almost the easy part. Because games are not just software. They are also art. They are worldbuilding. They are pacing. They are color and tone and architecture and motion. They require sound design, music, character animation, writing, direction, level layout, voice acting, cinematography, lighting, narrative cohesion, UX clarity, thematic consistency. They require all of it, and all of it has to feel right. A single janky animation can shatter the illusion. One bad line of dialogue can deflate an entire cutscene. One tedious mechanic can make players question why they’re even here.

Artists in other mediums can work in isolation. Writers go off into a cabin. Painters stare down a canvas. Filmmakers, at least, deal with a linear outcome. Game developers are trying to choreograph a chaotic ballet of systems, aesthetics, and feedback loops in a medium where the audience is not just a viewer—they are an active participant. The game has to anticipate the player’s desires without being too predictable. It has to challenge them without being unfair. It has to entertain while obeying invisible mathematical constraints. It must be coherent in motion, not just on the page.

Interactivity is both the essence and the curse of games. It’s what makes them unique and what makes them borderline impossible. Every mechanic you introduce has consequences. Let the player jump? Now every level has to account for that. Let the player pick up objects? Now every object needs rules. Let the player go anywhere? Now you need content everywhere. Every inch of freedom is an exponential explosion in development effort. And players don’t care. Nor should they. They don’t want to hear about memory budgets or AI pathing issues. They just want the thing to work.

That’s the unspoken truth of game development: the player does not care how hard it was. Nor should they. If they see the seams, if they notice the constraints, if they can smell the budget—then the illusion is broken. Games are a magic trick that took five years and a hundred people to rehearse, and the audience is sitting there wondering why the rabbit didn’t come out of the hat faster.

And it does take years. The scope keeps creeping. Tools change midstream. Consoles shift generations. Middleware updates break integrations. And through it all, the target keeps moving. What felt good six months ago now feels dated. What seemed like a bold mechanic now looks like an annoying gimmick. Playtesters hate your favorite level. Management wants a new direction. Entire systems get thrown away after months of investment. That’s just normal. That’s the cost of making a thing that doesn’t exist until all the parts align.

Unlike films or books, which can gestate in drafts, games have to be playable before they can be judged. Which means that you have to build scaffolding just to realize that something doesn’t work. You have to implement a whole subsystem, with physics and animations and input mappings and edge-case error handling, before you can even answer the basic question: “is this fun?” And if it’s not, you throw it away and start again. That cycle happens dozens, sometimes hundreds of times, across every department. The cost isn’t just time—it’s morale. Burnout in game dev isn’t a fluke. It’s baked into the friction of trying to do too many things at once, perfectly, under constant pressure.

You’re building a house while rearranging the plumbing while writing the script for the drama set inside while designing the wallpaper patterns, all while people peek in through the windows and ask why you haven’t finished yet. And you can’t blame them for asking. They only see the final product. And they’ll be ruthless if it fails.

Games are the most collaborative, most technically demanding, most artistically ambitious medium we’ve ever invented. They combine the logic of machines with the irrationality of human emotion. They’re expected to be responsive like software, expressive like cinema, and expansive like novels. They’re puzzles, sandboxes, stories, simulations. They contain multitudes, and somehow all those multitudes have to run at 60fps.

So it’s no wonder so many games never ship. Or ship broken. Or arrive late, over budget, and half of what they were meant to be. The miracle isn’t that some games turn out great—the miracle is that any of them make it out at all.