It's a friendly wrapper to SDL. The people saying "but it's not a serious engine" are letting the point of it fly over their head. If what you want is some raw control over I/O it's a fine choice, provided you aren't going for a compute-intensive main loop. I know of a few folks who shipped pygame stuff in the 2000's - that was an era when software rendering was still defacto the right choice for high compatibility, and of the options for speeding up development, a dynamic typed language offered some compelling advantages. If your game didn't scroll the screen, or targeted low res and 256 colors, or you mixed it with pyOpenGL, it was hardly the end of the world. The first comment in that Quora thread is from a student, who unsurprisingly has blamed the tool.
Emphasis on "pygame is slow" mostly comes down to "Python* is slow", and that, too, has an asterisk in that you can hybridize to add Cython or a C module. It will never be as fast as a good native code implementation, but when using all available tools to extend performance, you could easily accomplish just about anything from 90's-era gaming.
Emphasis on "pygame is slow" mostly comes down to "Python* is slow", and that, too, has an asterisk in that you can hybridize to add Cython or a C module. It will never be as fast as a good native code implementation, but when using all available tools to extend performance, you could easily accomplish just about anything from 90's-era gaming.