Disclaimer: wasn't able to read the article behind the paywall.
A lot of programmers get into the game industry because there are interesting technical problems to solve. Personally I'd have a hard time working on what look to me like deathly dull problems in fields like healthcare IT. For good, experienced programmers in the game industry I don't think the pay gap is as big as you suggest. I know a lot of game industry veterans who have taken higher paying positions in big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple but I don't think your average corporate programming job pays comparably.
I started my own VR company in the healthcare space which gives me the opportunity to continue working on interesting games technology while also hopefully improving people's lives but for my own personal motivation the work has to be interesting to me, not just paying the bills and benefiting end users (although both of those are important).
I don't know about industry wide, but I do know colleagues who went from gaming to other ("corporate programming") jobs, even non-profits, and got a boost in pay.
Game shops chew up their employees and spit them out, mainly because there is no end in sight to the number of young, naive people willing to take any kind of abuse for the prospect of having their name in the credits of a game.
The game industry pays pretty badly for the first few years when they can expect people to work out of 'passion'. However if you're one the handful of people that can thrive in that environment and move past the chew up/spit out stage and become one of the senior engineers that actually keeps the ship together then the pay can be very good.
Gaming is a big industry. My experience is mostly in 'traditional' games companies shipping what used to be boxed AAA console and PC games. A chunk of that experience was at EA which has a lot of senior employees with many years of experience who are being paid reasonably competitively. Not Google/Facebook money generally but not horrible. Things might be different in younger companies doing mobile game development, I haven't worked in that environment.
Big companies like EA recognized some time ago that they couldn't afford to lose their most experienced employees by "chewing them up and spitting them out" any more and have become more competitive for senior devs in both pay and working conditions. I still think there's work to do there but it's not as bad in my experience as some people seem to think.
A lot of programmers get into the game industry because there are interesting technical problems to solve. Personally I'd have a hard time working on what look to me like deathly dull problems in fields like healthcare IT. For good, experienced programmers in the game industry I don't think the pay gap is as big as you suggest. I know a lot of game industry veterans who have taken higher paying positions in big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple but I don't think your average corporate programming job pays comparably.
I started my own VR company in the healthcare space which gives me the opportunity to continue working on interesting games technology while also hopefully improving people's lives but for my own personal motivation the work has to be interesting to me, not just paying the bills and benefiting end users (although both of those are important).