Game companies often seem (to my eyes) to cluster around major CS universities, and incidentally many of these universities have vibrant arts/creative communiti

Game companies often seem (to my eyes) to cluster around major CS universities, and incidentally many of these universities have vibrant arts/creative communities (especially the juggernauts like UC schools, Toronto, Vancouver, MIT, etc etc). I think if you scraped even the top 500-1000 indie games you’d see some pretty serious clustering. But there are, of course, also very large communities for gaming online, from development to consumption. Most (if not effectively all) "core-CS" innovation takes place at university research groups, corps, and conferences, a much higher barrier to entry than itch.io for instance. CS innovation really requires a large amount of experience in a very limited subfield to make progress. Game design is just less esoteric than the frontiers of CS imo.