I've worked adjacent to the game development industry for most of my working life. What does that mean? Well, I've made and published games, worked on game development libraries, contributed to open source game dev projects and created my own art assets and so on.

But I've never worked at a big game dev company. I had a job interview at one once but then I got a job at a regular desktop and web dev software company and that was that.

At one point I got burnt out and almost quit game dev forever. I took a year off and didn't do any game dev stuff at all.

Then one day I realized that I really do just enjoy game dev as a hobby. Not taking it too seriously and treating it as art was one of the best things I ever did. Surprisingly, I get more done now than ever before and most importantly I enjoy it again.

My advice after this experience goes like this...

1. Yes, working at a big game dev company requires long hours and the pay sucks but what you choose to do with your time matters more. If you love making games, then make games. Stop listening to what other people say about this and spend your life doing what you love doing. It's your life, you can change your mind.
2. There are many paths to success. Most of them are not a straight line. It's possible to build a game dev career if you really want it badly enough or you can come up with some hybrid approach making games in your spare time alongside a day job.
3. Whatever path you take, be prepared for a long journey. Almost nobody makes it big on their first game. Even Markus Persson, the guy who created Minecraft made 30+ games beforehand. Most people didn't play his previous games.
4. You don't actually need wild success to be successful. There's plenty of indie devs that make a decent modest income selling pretty average games on Steam, app stores or other funding models.
5. Most game dev success comes from finding the niche within the niche. When you get good at game dev the hard part is not making games. It's deciding which games to make. Fortunately, if you've spent enough time messing around you'll eventually find a little corner of the market to take for yourself. If you make something uniquely enjoyable there will be people that want to buy it.

Okay, that's the general thousand foot view advice out of the way. Now for something a little more practical you can start doing right away.

Make a small game and publish it on itch. It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't have to be unique. You can clone another game and put your own twist on it if you want. You don't have to charge money for it. The goal is simply to get someone... anyone to play your game and provide feedback. That's harder than you might think and yet you'll learn more through that experience than you'll get from any school or tutorial video.

Once you've actually published a real game, any game, you've go the ball rolling and you can move onto the next or decide to do something else with your life.