A question for people in the gaming industry.

This is kind of a weird question, so cut me some slack. If it is inappropriate I apologize cause I am new to this forum.

I am very technical. I have been working with computers since my parents gave me a TI-99A4. My career has started as a VB coder and right now I am self employed with a handful of employees under me building primarily web applications for traditional businesses.

So maybe its a mid life crisis or something, but I recently have had a major desire to get into making games. I am a big fan of the creativity involved in computer/console games, and would love to be a part of their development.

So, I've been working with DirectX with a passion and am convinced I could do the work if a company cut me some slack the first week to get up to speed, since it is a new type of work. I come with some major development knowledge and technical skills....just with the tools and experience to build business tools not games.

I would like to know from anyone who has or is working in the gaming industry if they see people like me going into gaming (right around 30ish and coming from a different type of technical background). Also, how do you get into it, what routes do you take? And where is most of the work (in the country)? How much could I expect to make? I imagine I would come in at not much higher than entry level.

I've even considered finding other programmers and just making my own PC game, but I would not do this without getting some other hardcore techys on board and I would definitely want to get a business plan down and probably secure some funding.

Well, I could go on, but if you have any suggestions or insider information about the industry I'd like to hear it.

This actually comes up a fair amount. I did some game programming for a living years ago, though not for pc games.

It is very, very difficult to get into gaming, and the pay is very very low for 99.9% of the people in it today, though once this was different. You have to either have a huge hit or create a game engine that many people use to make any money, and even that is not a guarantee.

Today, most of the programming is fairly high level because fps games are about 2/3 the games out there, and everyone uses the same gaming engines for them, and there are a few game engines that get used for most of the rest of the genres as well.

Keep in mind you work excessive hours doing game programming. Also, the teams are all very small, and the programming is still much more low-level than any business programming or even most shrink-wrapped application programming in C++ let alone VB or Java, so basically VB and Java experience counts for nothing with gaming companies, and neither do business-oriented skills, software engineering or architecture skills in the traditional sense, etc., really.