Well, games are seen as fun, so they can attract programmers even with low salaries.
Basically the same reason pet veterinaries and teachers and nurses and musicians and artists still attract plenty of candidates despite a comparatively low pay.
(Playing games is more fun than working with CRUD apps. But writing games and writing CRUD apps seem about equal in their probability distributions of fun.)
Most of this is about the not-so-much-anymore-exotic art of GPU programming. It's becoming important in so many fields. The last thing I want to be is some foot-dragging old windbag who forgot to stay up to date.
As long as you get the job done within the estimates and make the client happy you're meeting your employment or job obligations. There is a lot of high paying salaries where people still parse csv jobs, and perform manual reporting with excel files.
This may sound laughable but I'm only in technology to build the future, I don't actually care about the money. Despite the current trend of tech pessimism, I still believe in tomorrow.
Gramsci's pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will can be a tough motivator but I'm trying.
Are you building your future? I'm 41, and there are probably other users here who're older than me how-ever I was told when I was 16 that ftp/smtp/csv/https/oracle/database are legacy technologies but every day its my bread a butter. Technologies will come and go but your time is more important than trying to build for the future.
Just recently one of our security experts dropped dead over the weekend. When everyone heard about it they were sad for about 5 minutes, then 5 minutes later everyone was talking about their kids, parents, family, vacations or what they're going to have for lunch.
I don't mean that to be condescending, your life is important to you. Build your future, technology will take care of itself.
