[sshumaker]

No, game development includes 'game engine development' - the majority of companies write their own engine or have heavily modified a licensed engine. And you often need to understand quite a bit of math to use even off the shelf engines - to debug issues and to tweak stuff.

Perhaps you're referring to what industry folk call gameplay programming? There's a lot less hardcore math there - but you still typically need to understand basic physics, trig, interpolation, etc.

[nzmsv]

Most of the time working with a game engine does not involve inventing any new mathematics, so there is an upper bound on just how hardcore it can really get :)