“Game dev” is a broad term nowadays — PC or mobile? Mobile game dev is “relatively” easy; there’s so many templates in Unity. It’s not “real development” though if you’re a hardcore engineer. AAA physics games otoh…those can be.

Either way, the stuff I’m reading here about salaries isn’t true if you’re at a good company, as would be the same in most industries.

The thing that makes it back breakingly hard is that, these days, games go into LiveOps mode and it becomes a constant content creation treadmill that burns out the team.

There’s also always the risk that your game flops, and sadly that’s pretty much instant bankruptcy and is the fate of ~80% of gaming startups.