The game industry is a lot like the porn industry. They both have the majority of their talent coming into the industry from the bottom. People eager to get into, willing to take a chance to see if the ride takes them somewhere. Both burn and churn people out after productions and during the course of their career. You have the same chance as finding a highly popular successful porn star in their 40's as you do a game developer still in the industry that worked on PS1 games. The rest left the industry, got pushed out, burned out or fucked. Sure there might be a few exceptions- mostly the ones that worked on the chart topping titles.

For every 5 dudes they lay off there are 50 more kids out of college or their basement willing to start working 60 hours a week for 40k a year with little or no security when a project ships. This destroys most of the leverage the employees have- get the fuck out if you think Red Dead Redemption wasn't successful enough to keep 40 people employed. If it was a bag of garbage, maybe I could see an angle here. It wasn't. This was a way to increase profits as most of the heavy lifting, ie - getting the game out is done. The smaller team can now work on DLC for a while until they ramp up for the next production.

To head off any bitching that I'm not offering a solution - here it is.

Get a degree in nursing and you'll work until you die.