When I was in middle/high school in the mid-late 90s, I was addicted to the precursors of today MMORPGs (back when everything was text-based), and my career plan consisted of founding a gaming company. My mother successfully (for a time) dissuaded me, saying "Who has
time to play games? Once you have money to pay for games, you'll be working at a job for most of your waking hours."
A couple years out of college, I actually did start a casual game company. Ended up giving up on it because by then I didn't really keep up with or care much about the gaming industry, but not before launching a website that hosted ~100 or so games, and getting some initial users. Most of our traffic came from the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. during the hours of 9 AM - 6 PM EST weekdays.
I recently took a glance around the gaming world. It's amazing how much it's changed. There are more AAA titles than you could possible know about. There are massively-multiplayer F2P games that people spend hundreds of dollars on. People will actually pay to watch other people play games, and there are folks who make full-time livings streaming games on Twitch.
It's different than it was in the 80s. Almost all the kids I grew up with had Nintendos or PCs, but it was a kids thing. Those kids are adults now, and they have disposable income (though not necessarily a lot of it), and the idea of climbing the corporate ladder is becoming less and less attractive to many people because corporations have made a habit of pulling the ladder out from under you just as you're halfway up. So people put the minimum amount of effort needed to not get fired into their jobs, and they spend their competitive energies in one of thousands of different games on their nights, weekends, and occasionally (if server logs are to be believed) workdays.
It's probably bad for the competitiveness of the American economy, but it's been great for the gaming industry.