[franknine]

I think it's just a matter of different industries having different situations.In game industry performance is a real business advantage thus it’s a goal. On consoles, every game developer works on the same machine, the one who can get the most computation out of the box can cram more visual effects or more complex AI behaviour into the game and win the race. (I know not all developers are into this photorealistic madness, but some big studios are still fighting over it) Even if you are working on mobile games, better performance means less battery drain (longer player engagement), less overheating, and being able to deploy onto older or weaker devices. (The performance scaling characteristic of the new Doom is so good that it can run on Switch) Again, these are real business values.

On the other hand, premium games generally generate little to none revenue after release. The gameplay and hardware would likely be different for the next title. For instance the rendering architecture changed from forward, deferred, to cluster in response to new hardware capabilities. Which means the maintainability and reusability of the game codebase is less important compared to other software projects. Also there is a tendency that game programmers receive less compensation compare to other industries (Higher supply of junior devs), so the calculation of man * hours would be different as well.