You might want to look into board games a bit. That industry still tends to thrive on making a quality product they can sell (unless it's on Kickstarter, then sometimes it's just about having really cool looking minis, with gameplay an afterthought) and not so much about how they can microtransaction the game to death.

It pays much worse than game programming though, unless you make a major hit, so you'll need to keep a day job, especially now that there's way too many games released every year that it has the same visibility problem as like, Steam does.

But you get to work with all sorts of people, and do so in person (like I'm going to an event in a couple weeks where I will be playtesting other designers' board games, and even a couple games by publishers themselves, and get to talk to and be friendly with the people who work for the publisher), and I've found it generally more fulfilling than my time in video games, personally.

Although that being said, I do miss video games and I've started working on one in my spare time again recently.