The reason salaries for game programmers are so low is that there is an effectively endless supply of new crops of graduates who have told themselves since they

The reason salaries for game programmers are so low is that there is an effectively endless supply of new crops of graduates who have told themselves since they were 12 that they want to make video games for a living. Classic supply and demand dictates that, with such a high supply, big studios can get away with paying very little (and can extract additional "benefits" as well, such as demanding insane hours and so on).