I could imagine a 22-year-old making $100K a year back then because I witnessed it. It was low in 2008 compared to just a few years prior. Sadly, the "kid" may have been "one-and-done" in that once the game was completed, he was out on his butt looking for the next gig in a field with fewer and fewer game offerings.
The average salary for a computer game programmer now is $74k. The days of being able to develop a cool game and sell it to a big company have been replaced with teams of professionals where fewer individuals stand out.
Amazon AWS went down for hours recently. Many websites went down including Pluto tv as I noticed when I turned it on.
Maybe some new guy did an update. Not the first time either when I did a search.
Here is the most recent.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759857/amazon-aws-down-outage-taco-bell-mcdonalds-burger-king