. Your comment is both directionally accurate and misses the point that the most talented engineers will be better paid elsewhere. The highest end gaming developers don't seem well paid or particularly talented as a group. From experience, Amazon pays six figure starting salaries to campus-hires to work in Java on (for example) eventually consistent file stores, distributed caching technologies, network virtualisation, video streaming encodes, etc. I know Google and Facebook offer similar pay scales for grads with equal diversity in skills. A senior talented engineer at these companies makes from $200,000-$400,000, which is vastly beyond what I have seen listed for gaming developers. The top end developers would be leaving $100k++ on the table each year to work in gaming.