I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.