The video game industry has become a juggernaut among cultural industries, but despite its growth and popularity, it remains incredibly difficult to understand 

Financially, it outpaces music and film combined. The outdated perception of games as a niche hobby for teenage boys has — almost — vanished. People of all ages play. You can find Mario and other franchises in books, on stage, and in stores. You can focus on different aspects like their nature or their music. A game mixes references and inspirations and can become one itself. Video game is mainstream.  

Yet when it comes to understanding how this industry actually works, everything suddenly feels like magical cooking. 

And it makes sense: we are never supposed to see how games are made. Games are designed to hide their own complexity. They aim for seamless experiences — you press a button or tap your phone and the game instantly responds with animations, sounds, and feedback. Most games do everything they can to avoid friction. Your questions must be answered, the rules must be clear, and progression must feel smooth.

But if we look closer, that smoothness is an illusion — the result of countless invisible decisions, tests, and compromises. And this complexity doesn’t stop at production.

Making a game is hard

Compared to other forms of entertainment, video games have two major specificities:
interactivity and real-time computing.

Take something as “simple” as the ability to jump in Super Mario Bros. (1985). You press a button and Mario jumps — straightforward, right?

A jump isn’t just a jump.

• How high does the character jumps ?
• How fast do they go ? 
• How fast do they fall ? 
• How do you want the character to control direction in midair ? 
• Do the jumps start when you press the button or release the button ?

Players can feel differences measured in tenths or even hundredths of seconds. And that input can arrive at any moment — the game must react instantly. There is no pause, no time to think. Everything must update up to 60 or even 120 times per second to maintain the illusion of control.

And that’s just jumping on flat ground. What about:

• Slopes
• moving platforms
• walls
• slow vs. fast movement
• different character states

Changing a single value can trigger a cascade across many teams:

• animation timing must be adjusted
• sound effects may no longer sync
• the camera might behave differently
• level design may break
• code must be retested to ensure nothing else is affected
  

Each new interaction between two elements generates more questions. Interdependencies mean that modifying one tiny aspect affects multiple disciplines at once.

Liz England’s famous example The Door Problem captures this perfectly: even opening a door involves dozens of teams.

And this leads to a second major source of confusion: because everything is so interconnected, every project becomes unique.

The complexity of game production: a gateway to labyrinths

To sum up, a game is complex. It requires the work of experts in different fields, whose work is interdependent. By nature, it is a piece of software with an absurd level of technological constraints. It is an interactive experience that offers a large number of possibilities to the player, and just as many uncertainties and challenges to the production team. 

It has a few external consequences:

Project uniqueness

Good documentation and communication help, and many challenges repeat from project to project. But despite 50 years of video game history and massive improvements in tools and processes, game production is far from solved.

In short, each project is unique ! Every new project introduces:

• new ideas and inspirations
• new people
• new tools or new versions of them
• new art directions
• new constraints

A game usually takes around 2 to 6 years to make. Between the start and the end of production, everything changes: engines evolve, tools get updated, the hardware landscape shifts, business models change, new regulations appear, and internal studio policies shift.

Even a well-tuned workflow may break because a tool becomes outdated or incompatible. A studio might adopt a new engine feature that helps one aspect of production but disrupts another.

And the cultural side matters too:
“Hey, this new mechanic in Call of Battlefield: Silksong of Hades 2 is cool — it would be nice to add something similar?”

You simply cannot standardize video game production the way you can in other industries. Too many variables shift at once.

A funny example of this is the words used. Depending on the tools, the projects, the studios, words don’t carry the same meaning ! 

Words are highly context dependent

Let’s start with “game developer”. In everyday language, “game developer” means anyone who makes games.

Inside the industry, it usually means:

• A programmer
• A gameplay programer 
• Any member of the dev team
• The studio itself (“the developer announced…”).

Same word, different meanings — depending on the studio, country, and person speaking.

• A funny one is  job titles. They don’t necessarily match directly their actual tasks.. 

There is no universal standard for game job titles.

A “Technical Artist” can mean:

• A shader expert
• A tools developer
• An animator who knows scripting
• A performance optimizer
• Someone who binds art to engine systems

It is similar for Producer, Narrative Designer, Gameplay Programmer, and so on. 

• Of course, this is also true for development-related words !

Let’s take the word “component” which means “a part of something” in the daily life.

In the video game production it depends on the tools, the programing architecture, the studio, or the project. 

• In the Unity game engine, it means a piece of behaviour. The behaviour of the sound, of the physics, etc.
• In the Unreal game engine, it means the visual or physical part of an entity that has a behaviour
• In an Entity Component System architecture, it means data. An health component can be the number of  maximum life you have for Mario.  

Depending on the studios or the project, it can take on many other meanings.

A new project for someone who works in video game production can mean new words, new tasks, new meanings, new communication challenges ! isn’t it cool ?! 

NDAs and the Industry’s Black Box

Beyond complexity and unstable vocabulary, two external forces make the game industry even harder to understand:

Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and video game media coverage.

The Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are standards in the industry. They legally prevent employees and partners from revealing project details, whether about gameplay, mechanics, storylines, upcoming releases.

There are a couple of reasons behind NDAs. Both the company and the team want to show their work when it’s ready to be shown.

• Teams want to show their work only when it’s ready.
• Marketing follows carefully orchestrated reveal plans.
• Leaks without context create false expectations.
• Licensed IPs (Marvel, Disney, etc.) require strict secrecy.

A simple rule of thumb, if you are asked “what do you work on ?”

You answer “I work on an unannounced project” ! And that’s good, it prevents useless sufferings for everybody !   But it also means the public rarely gets insight into the production side of games. Most knowledge stays inside studios, especially when proprietary tools are involved.

Video game coverage with voiceless workers

A game takes years to make, crafted by experts in dozens of disciplines. But when it comes time to talk about it, there are rarely part of it ! It’s not in the industry culture yet ! Sometimes we don’t have all the tools to speak about them ! 

The data, the project information, and the related figures are not public. When a game releases, you have a few interviews given from some directors, the game itself, and the credits. 

And unlike cinema — where directors often explain the artistic vision behind a movie — the “vision” of a game evolves constantly. Core intentions change many times during development. Many decisions come from technical constraints, and the solutions are crafted by different teams at different moments. None of this is visible from the outside.

Because we lack access to real production details, we compensate. We try to make sense of games by creating buckets, labels, and comparisons — even when they’re imprecise.

For budget:

• AAA means a big budget between roughly 50 millions to 500 millions. The next GTA is in the same category as a game with a tenth — or even less — of its budget. 
• AA  usually means between 10 and 50 millions 
• Indies stand for smaller games

For team size: 

• Solo-dev means one person creates the game
• Indies may refer to studios of 20 up to 30 people
• AAA studios have hundreds, if not thousands, of people working on the game

This creates confusion, because:

An “indie” can have a huge publisher.

A “large studio” can make a small game.

A “solo dev game” can be high-tech (e.g., tools or procedural systems).

You have these kinds of label for the business models, for the “type” of game, for the audience, for the platform, etc…

So players and journalists, and sometimes even developers, use shortcuts — labels that oversimplify reality just to make conversation possible.

Currently, there is only one way to tackle this issue, talk with the game developers  — if their NDAs allow it ! 

Video game industry : an endless learning journey 

For all its complexity, the video game industry is also endlessly rewarding. Its challenges are part of the appeal. You work alongside passionate and talented experts that make you discover their disciplines. You never stop learning and grow. 

In the end, the same complexity that makes games hard to understand from the outside is what makes them fascinating to build from the inside. It’s a field where curiosity is essential, and where there is always something new to discover.

That definitely one of the reason that made me fall in love for this industry. This industry is enriching, humbling, and extremely rewarding when things come together ! 
It reminds me of the famous “duck-rabbit” illusion, the industry looks simple from afar, but shifts into something entirely different when you look closer.

Written by Clément Stocco

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