There are quite a few people who want to work on games, true. But I am not so sure the pool of talented engineers that are very good at the tasks game development poses is much larger than anywhere else in industry.

On the other hand, I don't think a very large portion of game development teams are engineers anymore. Not only are the tools much better, there is much more focus on other things like art, sound, marketing, design, etc...

Two years ago I had a conversation with a recruiter who was working with a company trying to build out a games-testing shop in Portland. They were offering people with 7-10 years experience $35/hr, and seemed shocked when I told them how low that was compared to previous non-games testing jobs I had held previously.

It's a good point that the proportion of employees who are engineers is probably lower than in the past. I wonder how engineering vs art/music salaries compare.