Are you missing a comma? You can get to 6 figures pretty easily, is the US a mid-level developer in many fields will be tipping 100k. But I don’t think many salaried programming jobs pay high six figures. A senior staff engineer at Google including stock options might get close to 300k if they are lucky.
To the OP if you aren’t restricting yourself to games development there are a pleotheroa of options but most of them probably start with a degree.
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Types of Company
The type of company you work for will have a big impact on the type of work you do, how you get compensated, and your opportunity for promotion.
Big Enterprise - Companies like banks and insurance companies generally pay mediam to high salaries, have good long term promotion opportunities if you are willing to transition to a manager or architect, and have reasonable stability (watch out for the mass lay-offs when new executive mangement comes in).
A degree wont be 100% manadatory but it will be close: not having one will often get your resume filtered out very early in the process.
On the negative side the bureaucracy and red-tape can be very frustarting, although you probably wont see too much of it for the first year or two. The work you do will probably be limited to very specific problems for long periods of time which might get a bit boring.
Small Enterprise - The work will be more varied and you will get to have more impact on what is being built. If the company is growing fast you will have opportunities for promotion, but often you can be stuck in the same role for many years.
The degree requirement will be less stringent than the big companies but it will still help a lot to get your foot in the door.
Scale-Ups (Start-ups that have secured Series B funding or large Series A funding) - There will be a lot of buzz and a lot of new faces which will make things feel exciting, but for the most part this will be like working for the small enterprise except you work longer hours, and the management structures are very unclear.
You will probably get some options, but don’t be fooled, after dillution and the years it takes for options to vest and then for the company to exit, in most cases you would have been financially better off at the bank job.
If the start-up is successful what you do gain is a resume that will look great, and also a very real chance of rapid promotion.
A degree will not be mandatory, paticularly if you can show relevant work like open source projects or Unity games 
Start-Ups - You will have a much bigger sense of influence, and your role will likely be much more varied. This will be a pretty challenging position for someone who is new to the workforce as you wont have a lot of structure and probably not a lot of guidance.
Stock options will likely be larger, but even here, unless the company exist at Unicorn levels (or you are getting co-founer type equity), don’t expect to come out rich. Most start-ups fail and even the ones that are success don’t typically exit for billions.
The main benefits here are similar to the scale-up but more so. If you are in the first ten hires you might start as a junior developer and five years later come out as Head of Engineering.
Of course the risks are also greater by a long margin too.
Consulting Companies (Large) - Consulting companies can be very lucrative places to work and are a great way to gain a lot of experience fast. However particularly for grads it can be very tough: the expectations on work hours can be gruelling and the competition for promotion will be fierce (and probably not based on how well you code).
Be wary of getting stuck on a big project for years. The main reason to join this kind of company as a grad is to get lots of varied experience and travel on the companies dime 
Degree will be required. Consulting companies care about the 'look 'of things, because that’s what their clients care about.
Consulting Companies (Small-Med) - This is a tough one becasue it is so varied. Generally people break away from a larger firm, form their own firm so they can get a bigger cut off the consulting rates, and poach a client or two. From here your experience would depend so much on the founders. I’d say shy away from these kind of companies for a first job unless they have a sterling reputation.
In short you are going to get a lot more opportunity if you get a degree. One option might be to freelance while you do a degree, either full time or part time depending on your own comfort level.
(Obviously these are all gross generalisations, and there will be many exceptions, variations etc, I still think it is useful)
Fields of Work
I wont list every field (of course), but let me break it up in to some categories.I have not included domains which are not typically programming roles (e.g. networking, security or UX design).
Back-end Engineer
Technologies like Java and C# .Net are deeply ingrained in countless projects, and if you focus on one of these languages you can be pretty confident of having work for a long time to come. You will need to keep up-to-date with the various frameworks and trends that rise to popularity, but there’s little chance these jobs wont be around in the future. A bit of a crowded space but theres a lot of work to go around. It is very traditional software engineering work.
Front-end Engineer
Javascript based frameworks like React and Angular used to make the user facing parts of an online application. Salary, demand, and marketplace are all similar to back-end development. There’s a chance for a bit of creativity and graphic design in some of these roles, but in larger companies, or companies with a strong UX focus, the role will be more about building what others have designed.
Full-Stack Engineer
Combine both of the above with a predeliction towards front end technolology. Will typically mean using NodeJS. Becasue you cover the ‘full stack’ you will often have a good amount of ownership and control over what you are building which might suit those who like to build complete things, rather than be a cog in the wheel. Be wanred in a large company full-stack developer may just mean, we’ll make you a front-end or back-end developer based on what we need at the the time.
Mobile Engineer
Like a front-end or full-stack developer except you build mobile applications instead of web applications. Could mean native development (Swift, Java) or using a framework like React Native. Over the last five or so years this has left the ‘speciality curve’ (see below) and become part of the status quo, so expect normal salaries. Like front-end and back-end development this won’t be going anywhere soon.
Note: When major new languages or frameworks emerge you can jump on board early and get similar benefits to the ‘specialisation’ item covered below.
Application Developer
Like a full stack engineer, but building desktop applications (C++ would be the langague of choice for the most part). This is very traditional engineering work but also a (slowly) dying field. I don’t expect it will ever actually die, but the bulk of work these days is in building online and mobile applications. Desktop applications are often skipped or added as an afterthought (e.g. see the Slack desktop app which is basically just a poorly performing wrapper around a web app).
If you are already in the field I expect you are fine, but I wouldn’t recommend this for new developers unless they have a really strong interest.
DevOps / SRE
A big trend over the last 5-10 years, in part fuelled by the prolifferation of cloud, has been the transition of infrastructure build and management to be driven from code (this is not all that DevOps means, but its what most companies mean when they are hiring). Its still quite different from traditional programming/engineering, but is growing fast and and if it holds your interest its likely a great track for both salary and security.
Data Engineer
There is a big focus from companies both small and large on collecting and processing large volumes of data to gather some kind of competitive or oeprational advantage. Data scientists focus on the techniques and algorithms, but they typically aren’t the engineers who build the data pipelines that effiecintly collect and process this data. Furthermore as the tools and technologies to support this have developed the need for ‘science’ has reduced and the need for ‘engineering’ has grown. This area will be undergoing growth for some time to come and there is a skill shortage. The work sits somewhere between devops, research science, and traditional engineering.
Specialisation in ‘Emerging’ Technology
Although not a domain per se, its worthy of calling out: there are many areas where technology has reached a point where it becomes useful to a lot of companies, but where there is a dearth of people who have the neccessary nous to leverage the tech. Technologies like blockchain or chatbots are in the tail end of this cycle (3-5 years ago there was little expertise, now there is more, but it still not common).
Finding some area like this where there is strong interest, but little expertise, can be a great way to rapidly accelerate your career progression or to bring in lucrative consulting contracts. What’s more you can often build your expertise through open source projects or personal projects. If you are competing with people who have no experience an open source contribution or a released project of your suddenly becomes like gold 
Look for areas that have left academia and have maturing tools. Speficic tools in areas like AI and AR spring to mind.
(There are a many other domains, but I’ve tried to cover some of the key ones, which might give a bit of insight)
Career Track
Will update or post again when I get some time.