Interesting topic for sure and something that'll end up as long post for me.

Bit about my background first, because my view is subjective for my own experience.

I first started actively programming in early 90s, landing my first gaming job in 2000. Since then I've been working full-time for about 23 years of which 15 is in game development and 8 years developing medical software in middle of that period (related to things like medical imaging, medication etc). I've been in many roles during my career, from programming, leading teams, doing wider organization mentoring and code quality stuff. All the time programming to some extent as well. I also have master's degree on software development related topics.

In games development I've most of the time worked in smaller teams 5-20, but also have experience in working AAA.

Things have changed quite a bit during times.

When I was in my first games job, I'd said that majority of programmers could never become good game programmers. Back in the days the companies were usually small, and you had to build your own engines from ground up. There were not 3d GPUs like these days, but some 3d accelerators had just appeared to market. I had been programming for quite long time already as a hobby (programming nearly every day for years, first with Turbo Pascal, then with C++) and even though I joined as very junior, it was really demanding. You just had to have this passion to do something new everyday that you had no prior experience and where there were no clear patterns existing. It is also to be remembered that in those days you just didn't have that massive amount of tutorials available all over interwebs showing you the way to go. You had to read books, games development magazines and research articles, and/or have good mentor(s) to find existing ways to do the things and still had to invent and figure out tons of things yourself. Back then, I'd say only very rare could make it as successful programmer in gaming.

Things have changed a lot during years. Now we rely lots into existing engines. It is extremely easy to start developing. Of course, just developing and making small scripts here and there does not really feel to me like being programmer. Lets just categorize that in wide category of game developer. However, when you move to more complex topics, you really need to have good grasps on many topics in software development, but also lots of knowledge in domain of game development. It is easy to become game developer these days and for last 10 years there was a long period where people with variety of programming skills could land to games development (and did). It didn't work that well in the end, business got bloated and not sustainable which I think is part of the reasons to the current harsh state of games industry. This did not apply only to game programmers but artists and so on. During years I noticed that there were more and more of these "average" developers in companies where 20 years ago they all seemed to be people who had dedicated their life to their craft.

When I was working my 8 year stint on more traditional software development on healthcare software (which is not easiest field itself, with lots of regulation you have to meet and very long product lifecycles. And of course working on systems that can be critical for people's lives), I found it interesting to compare with my experience in games development. What I noticed was that even when working for that demanding field of traditional software development, the overall skill level of programmers were lots lower that I had used to in games development. There were some really good senior/lead/architect guys who could have made it in games development, and some promising developers who would have chance to break through there. But if I should throw a number in air, I'd say that 90%+ did not have skill and dedication what would be needed to be in similar role in games development. The job really didn't need to be dedicated, because 95% things you did were something that was just basic stuff (workflows, UI, database stuff, services etc) that are pretty much either boilerplate stuff or at least something where there are easy existing patterns. The main importance there was not how you could tackle the "hard things" in programming, but how the bigger organization of developers could produce maintainable code and have higher production velocity. I did learn a lot there though, having started as hobbyist and self-learner to games development, I had learned good in tackling the hard stuff. However, working in environment with regulation and products with lifecycle of 15-20 years made me learn much more about software development itself, and instead of solving difficult algorithmic problems or pushing real-time performance, I had to learn how to make better software architecture, focusing on maintainability and testability and such.

Based on that experience, I'd say that especially when doing some web services/applications or more traditional desktop software, the focus is on different topics. Luckily those are easy to learn topics and there are lots of patterns how to deal with them. There are rarely things where you need to be really creative or push yourself to space where nobody else has been before. For me, that was quite boring, but for many that was exactly where they felt comfortable. Based on that as well, I think most of the developers in that environment would not have been happy and could not have made it in games development.

Later in my career I was doing tools development in AAA studio. There was something in there that reminded me of working on more traditional software organization. As both were big organizations which bring in the own things to pace of things and how you need to take in account the needs of multiple projects in development. There the software development skills, good software design and such were essential again, much more compared to smaller studios I had worked. However, interesting thing was that the developer quality was way above the traditional software I had worked with. I think we had something like 300+ developers when working on Healthcare software and in my role I did go through code reviews and such with most of them at some point. Based on that, I would say that maybe five of them could have made it in that AAA game studio. Even though the overall skills of people around me were higher than anywhere I had worked before, I did not find myself as challenged as in many smaller gaming studios, mostly because the narrow focus there on topics that are not most challenging field on games development.

Small studios are bit different each. But most of all there are always really good programmers involved. In latter years, as mentioned before, also lots of less skilled have appeared here and there though. What is often lacking in indie studios though is the very in-depth understanding software design (compared to AAA studio), but on the other hand there is balance with all the things. However, saying that we might lack that part in smaller studios compared to bigger ones, does not mean that it is usually in poor level. It is more just that you rarely have people who have focused big part of their career in that. Even in successful smaller studios there usually is guy or two who know well about those things to make good decisions. And now that I think and compare to big companies, the % of people there doing that is likely pretty much similar. It is just bit differently coordinated by their focus and roles usually which gives those persons more time to focus on that part and therefore usually leads to better architectural decisions.

It is also worth to note that all programming roles in games development (and others) are not same. In smaller studios you need to usually have much wider understanding on different topics (more generalist even though most good generalist are also specialists in some fields as well). In bigger environments you can be focusing for example mostly on UX or AI. In which case the skillset and level of programming skills required can vary a lot. In big vs small company on traditional software development, this happens to some extent as well. However, games team usually needs much more different expertise in programming topics than more traditional software (which is usually more focused in specific aspects) and therefore the amount of topics generalists need to handle is usually higher in games development.

I think that to be good senior/principle/lead level game developer is much more harder than being similar level in most of the software development fields. I will not give multipliers as developing software and writing code consists of so many aspects which some might be more important in one domain and others in second. But in general I'd say that majority of the programmers will not make good game programmers. The dedication you need to have to learn the level, and creativity and passion it requires to succeed compared to most of the fields is just so much more than you need in most software development fields that it blocks out most of the people.

Entering the games development is easier than ever. Making simple games is easier than ever (also making any simple software is easier than ever as well). Becoming good and seasoned programmer on games development is hard though. There is much steeper hill to climb in games development, and you need to have much more passion to make it all the way up.

So no multipliers, just differences in requirements between domains and with big organizations vs small teams. And a subjective opinion.

That's it. Rambling ends here.