Seconded. If you're in gamedev(as I am), you're essentially going into it as your lifestyle. You can make it a reasonably sane, healthy one if you can find a n

Seconded. If you're in gamedev(as I am), you're essentially going into it as your lifestyle. You can make it a reasonably sane, healthy one if you can find a niche and make it as an indie, but good money won't ever be the motivating factor, and working in the studio environment is harsh and essentially requires migrating to find new work every time you're taken off a project. When new segments take off, like casual gaming did a few years ago, or social gaming more recently, you have a better chance of money and stable employment, but it'll fade away when the market saturates. That said, the bar to make it is really high. It's not as impossibly high as making it as a musician, I think, because the variety of situations and skillsets is exponentially larger in the interactive multimedia context - so you always have less competition for your particular skillset - but it's definitely harder than "business programming" because you can add as many technical challenges as you want(soft real-time simulations, physics, graphics, audio, world persistence, networking, tools+scaffolding....) and still have only scratched the surface on what the computer is potentially capable of as an entertainment device. If you take pains to avoid technical challenges you can make games more quickly, but you have to take on at least one or two to have a game, and adding more usually helps quality. Plus, the code alone doesn't make a game. The final game is the result of code+assets+design+player feedback - and lots of meticulous details. Game design isn't terribly different from business in that you have to make tons of hard decisions with little information immediately available. And like in business, you can get more info, but you have to work at it.