For me it's board game design. It would be nice to make serious money off of it, and it is possible, but most people I know, even with successful games, aren't making enough to quit their day jobs (that pay a lot less than software dev).
Hell, one guy I know had a game you could buy at Barnes and Noble he worked on in his spare time for two years, and the publisher considered to be one of their more successful titles, earn only $10k in royalties (which he split 50/50 with a codesigner), so he only got $5k out of it.
I could take a simple dev job and make that in a week of work.
And it's a very collaborative field, so I get to meet a lot of people in the industry just by going to conventions and offering to playtest their games or help publishers demo their games to potential customers.
Hell, one guy I know had a game you could buy at Barnes and Noble he worked on in his spare time for two years, and the publisher considered to be one of their more successful titles, earn only $10k in royalties (which he split 50/50 with a codesigner), so he only got $5k out of it.
I could take a simple dev job and make that in a week of work.
And it's a very collaborative field, so I get to meet a lot of people in the industry just by going to conventions and offering to playtest their games or help publishers demo their games to potential customers.