Both companies that develop games and individual programmers are correctly called developers, and have been since the start of gaming.

Those companies develop games. And for a long time, almost no programmer develops a whole game - they provide code, artists provide art, producers direct, investors fund, and so on.

So while a large group develops the game, most of which aren't generally called developers, programmers have shrunk in scope from when they did do most of the work (say in the 70s and early 80s).

If anything, game companies are more correctly labeled developer, and programmer should be programmer.

For example, search for top game developers... Not an individual in the list... Such uses go back as far as gaming.

The word simply has multiple meanings.