Game programming does have engines and frameworks to get you off the ground quickly, and the early access stuff definitely feels like an equivalent to the "MVP first, iterate later" approach. This approach is only recently becoming viable because of digital distribution on PCs and on consoles. Before that you shipped a disk, and that was it. So you didn't get the chance to do any real iterating.
It wasn't until maybe 5 years ago that the out of the box engines were any good. Before that you either had to pay a lot of money (Unreal Engine, id Tech, Cryengine... also Flash!) or you rolled your own stuff out of the libraries that were lying around (Ogre3D, OpenAL, irrlicht). Once Unity and other engines with low entry points became common, things got a lot better.
But game programming also frequently runs into another issue: performance. Your whole game world has to update in 16-33 milliseconds, so you end up dealing with some very low level problems because fitting everything into 16ms can be really hard. Just take Minecraft as an example.
It wasn't until maybe 5 years ago that the out of the box engines were any good. Before that you either had to pay a lot of money (Unreal Engine, id Tech, Cryengine... also Flash!) or you rolled your own stuff out of the libraries that were lying around (Ogre3D, OpenAL, irrlicht). Once Unity and other engines with low entry points became common, things got a lot better.
But game programming also frequently runs into another issue: performance. Your whole game world has to update in 16-33 milliseconds, so you end up dealing with some very low level problems because fitting everything into 16ms can be really hard. Just take Minecraft as an example.