Games are more than "graphics programming". In fact, the fraction of programmers on a game is small, and the number of graphics programmers is a tiny fraction o

Games are more than "graphics programming". In fact, the fraction of programmers on a game is small, and the number of graphics programmers is a tiny fraction of that. In my most recent project we didn't even have a dedicated graphics programmer because we used Unreal Engine. Yes, sometimes things had to be tuned and UE had to be kicked in the butt, but mostly it just worked. I haven't worked in regular software in ages and have no intention of every going back to that. A single game will have multiple areas in which you have fun, interesting and challenging problems to solve. You don't typically get that in a vanilla software job. Of course, if you work for a large game company, they tend to have specialists for various areas and I would guess the job gets old in one of those places pretty quickly. In my experience, the ones who really get exploited in the game industry are non-programmers. There are plenty of young people who want to work on games but not be programmers. They are frequently tracked into QA, game design or producer (known as program manager elsewhere) careers. There's an oversupply of these kids and along with artists they are the most egregiously underpaid. The best among them do go on eventually to be game designers (or upper management if they so desire) and do well.