I'm not sure what the point you're getting at is, either. The meat of my original comment was that anyone making ****ty html5 games for a living is probably not "living the dream," but working a job that only superficially resembles their dream. I think we're in agreement - because you can't make the kinds of games you want to professionally (apparently), you're working in a different field entirely, right?
My point is that even when someone is working their "dream job", there will be undesirable additions and other substantial differences in the reality that aren't present in the dream.
I now work mostly in web development because my first work placement in university ended up in web development. There weren't many postings in game development to start with (1 game position for at least every 10 non-game positions), and I didn't get the gigs I applied for. As much as I wanted to keep the game development path still open, the web development side had the first move and kept snowballing much faster than I expected, and the income isn't that bad. I've been in enough business education classes to not choose love over bread. And so game development became my hobby instead.
For the record, I know that most people don't end up with their dream jobs. I think I've made it pretty clear in this thread that I don't think many people have what it takes to make money making amazing games. Those people do exist, though, even though your attitude seems to imply that they don't. Not all of us are doomed to choosing between feverishly pumping out garbage to stay afloat and abandoning the field entirely. There are a number of studios and individuals releasing incredible games to critical, commercial, and assumably personal success. I think Toby Fox probably has enough money to hire an accountant and take his time on his next game.
My attitude doesn't suggest that people who make a living out of games don't exist. My attitude suggests that these people get to be that way because they are willing to accept and adapt to the yawning differences between their original dream and their professional reality.
Read any autobiography or article by a game developer about their professional lives, and they're invariably filled with anecdotes of compromise or uncomfortable change. Things like loss of personal time, loss of creative freedom, ethical and moral conflicts, migration to management-level roles. Things that have no place in a dream but sit comfortably in reality.
Of course there is no shortage of people like me who settled on a non-game career and benched the dream as a hobby. Indeed most of my life is unlike my original dream. But on the contrary, my spare time gets to be closer to my original dream than ever before. When my usual uniform comes off, I get to be a kid again. I get to do it the way I wanted. I get to do it the way I used to, just with more experience in CS. None of that is an option for a professional. Not ending up in my original dream job ended up being the best thing that happened to me.
It's safe to say that the usual popular vision of life as a game developer probably doesn't involve red tape with publishers and app stores, payment processors and API partners going cuckoo, or eventually delegating away actual development to contractors to focus on a management role. But all of that is reality for a professional. If you turn professional without adjusting your dream to accommodate these strains, it's untenable.
This is what I mean by when people are living the dream, it seldom pans out to what the dream originally was. Even for those who do stay professional in the same field and manage to make it work, the reality is often a heavily altered, barely recognizable version of their original vision.
