Making video games is a cool job. Making enterprise CRUD software isn't. Video game studios can therefore treat workers worse and get away with it because for at least some subset of the workforce, they'll put up with it.

I personally don't understand people who work for blockchain, or as cashiers, waiters, customer support, etc.

I tried those jobs as there is no deep-rooted love of anything around those, just a job, and still a ton of people do it.

On the other hand, working on video games, despite being often underpaid, often full of crunching and sometimes monotonous, is something I do understand. It's literally as close as "follow your dreams" go but for programmers who are into games.

My current company is a 4 day work week, fully remote and good pay. I feel I get more work done in a 32 hour week than I did at another company where I had hit ~90 hour weeks a few times. I'm not going back and fixing code I wrote while sleep deprived.

Also worked outside games in STEM, education and a couple startups. I wouldn't say they were particularly better.

If you're a literature expert, do you really want to do copy-editing for doordash when you could be writing interactive narratives?

If you're a UI designer, are wireframes for the latest AI chat app even 25% as exciting as designing the HUD for a new video game?

And then some skill sets are just not really transferable at all. Game design leans on skills that are transferable but 'game designer' doesn't really map to other fields at all, and it is a real specialization that some people have decades of time spent honing.

Once they realize how depressed their wages were in the games industry there’s no hope of getting them back.

Recent example: "Megabonk" was made by a solo indie dev in a few months. It has reportedly sold around 2 million copies at $10 in 1 month.

EA makes games with numbers in their names. They do not take on a lot of risk, which means "anyone" could do it. So they have to work very, very hard. This is NOT a complicated idea.