This comes down to supply and demand - people want to work on games, and don't see a way to get a experience and/or a paycheck out of it outside the large companies.
This isn't weird, because people aren't rational - I know plenty of people who took degrees in fields where the supply of labor outnumbers the jobs available, and thus work less than ideal hours, for less pay and more abuse than they should.
I'd love for everyone to be able to do what they love, but frankly this is frequently the result.
Also, there's an unfortunate truncation on that URL...
I think that's changing a bit, though. There are a lot more independant developers and people who are skipping the mainstream publishing/dev-studio industry and finding better success. And if they're both irrational choices, why not?
Some examples: the game that swept the GDC Choice awards was Journey, made by a small independent studio with an exclusivity deal rather than a more traditional publishing relationship. Minecraft is one of the best-selling games of all time: the XBox 360 version alone sold more than Gears of War 2, to give you a point of comparison. The average indie game won't see this level of success, of course, but neither will the average big-publishing mainstream game.
This isn't weird, because people aren't rational - I know plenty of people who took degrees in fields where the supply of labor outnumbers the jobs available, and thus work less than ideal hours, for less pay and more abuse than they should.
I'd love for everyone to be able to do what they love, but frankly this is frequently the result.
Also, there's an unfortunate truncation on that URL...