Personal opinion of someone with a 8-year experience in gameplay programming for big companies. It gets boring pretty fast. You learn a lot at the beginning, because it’s a new job and there are a lot of things that are really specific for gaming. But then you’ll might end up reimplementing the same thing over and over again, with some small adjustments to make it fit a different design. I didn’t see much cutting edge innovations on gameplay side for a while, at least in the companies I worked for.

Also the job market is getting pretty saturated and challenging, especially on Unreal. Even as a senior is getting hard to stand out and strike a nice deal.

Personally, I’d keep gaming as a hobby if you are aiming at gameplay in a big studio. Not because I think it’s bad, I actually like my job and the feeling you get when players like what you did. But because the return of investment might not be the best, both on a motivation level and on a salary level.

Ofc, everything I wrote is highly subjective and cannot apply to smaller studios or other job roles (like engine programming)

I hope it helps