There's typically more focus on analytics and the science skills over artistic skills (sorry graphic artists, environmental artists, etc.) obviously, but backend developers in gaming often have a lot of useful overlapping skills and knowledge in terms of systems design, design patterns, sets of problems, etc.

Pay is good, work/life balance is great, intellectually stimulating, it's challenging yet enjoyable (though arguably not as fun as game development). In many cases, industry borrows or leverages work from the gaming industry quite a bit.

A step further and the defense industry/military industrial complex would also love to have more game developers--though tech has a pretty anti-government pro-business vibe overall (not surprisingly).

This needs a lot of qualification. Even someone doing scripting probably has picked up coding fluency at least. Programming game engines and networking code is definitely tackling complex problems and could at least get a mid-level dev role. I think 3d asset creation is probably the most game-specific role, and even that is something that is used by special effects companies and design firms.

> That advice makes sense if a company you works for sucks, but if an entire industry is broken, you can't just tell people to suck it up and find a new industry.

You absolutely can tell people to suck it up and find a new industry. This mentality is why the game industry can get away with bad work life balance and low job security. Because people keep working there. If the game industry was starved for talent, then they'd have to offer better work experiences.

This is exacerbated by employers either overtly colluding with each other (as in the lawsuit several years ago over tech companies having an agreement not to hire each other's employees) or simply setting compensation to "industry averages" and following "industry best practices".

To the extent that every big tech company behaves the same as every other big tech company, there's effectively only one big tech employer.