I used to want to be in the video game industry but I found the long and sometimes unpredictable hours a major drawback. It sounds like even he gets a little tired working the job - "It can be a lonely career."

There is more in the video game industry than retail. I'm a game entrepreneur and there are lots of things to be done other than retail, that get you in a better situation than it.

There are casual games -- but you're not going to be working on the cool 3D stuff unless you bow to the giant studios and work 80 hours a week.

Yes, but I'm not talking about it either. I work with interesting technologies (computer vision, virtual reality, 3d, etc) for the events industry. There are lots of opportunities in games other than retail and casual.

"It can be really stressful especially if there is a bug in the program. That pushes us back by almost a week."

I'd love to only ever have these kinds of bugs.

I feel back for this guy, he seems really lonely and isolated. Life is too short to live like that, regardless of how much money you make.

I was rather surprised how much money he is making. I'm living in germany and I don't think you can get even close to such amounts in any gamecompany here. Even as lead getting above 70000$ will be hard. Also from several own applications I had the experience that game companies tended to offer usually more than 1000$ less per month than any other programming companies. Is that different in the USA?

If you're a game programmer here you simply don't do it for the money.