It’s incredibly hard to come up with novel and sticky ideas for video games, and it’s even harder to create new core mechanics that won’t just be copied by other games quickly.
It’s also hard to compete and make your idea stand out. There are over 20,000 new video games released each year on Steam alone. The reality is an inverse situation where you’ll care about your video game (or startup) so much, but nobody else cares about you or your game. It’s challenging to get a critical mass of people excited about new indie games.
Making a successful video game feels closer to winning the lottery - except it also requires a years-long grind to build, iterate, and test gameplay ideas.
Programming used to be the slowest part of game development. As building games becomes easier, more games will compete for less total attention. The slowest and hardest job is now game design.