"same people have much better options" No, no they don't: people seem to forget that at a game company, the minority of people are engineers. The extremes are

"same people have much better options" No, no they don't: people seem to forget that at a game company, the minority of people are engineers. The extremes are designers: there is pretty much no equivalent to, say, level design outside of the games industry. Other design disciplines - it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to find a way their game work could translate into something out of that industry. Art? There's a bit of fleeing of hollywood VFX going on - it's no more attractive for 3D artists that the gaming industry. Other forms of art in games as well pretty much only have an overlap with hollywood as well (audio too). Game industry QA? Doesn't really exist in that form anywhere else, but it's a minimum wage job either way. All this to say that many of the jobs in the games industry don't translate to much outside of it.