No, game development includes 'game engine development' - the majority of companies write their own engine or have heavily modified a licensed engine.  And you often need to understand quite a bit of math to use even off the shelf engines - to debug issues and to tweak stuff.<p>Perhaps you're referring to what industry folk call gameplay programming?  There's a lot less hardcore math there - but you still typically need to understand basic physics, trig, interpolation, etc.