I actually was homeless once for a few weeks. I mean genuinely without any place I could afford to stay, not merely stuck in a youth hostel or something. That was when I lost my old rpg collection. I had two backpacks, one had clothes and day-to-day stuff, the other had books and personal stuff I could live without - including my rpg collection. The second one was pretty heavy and hard to schlep around with the first one, so I put it in a train station locker, hoping to pick it up in a couple of days.
For the next ten days, I had $50, that was enough for food but not for somewhere to stay. After that I got something like $150, so I could stay someplace. However the train station lockers, you had to put the money in to get the goods, and it was something like $3 every four hours, not much if you really are just waiting for a train, but after a week... I preferred sleeping in a bed with hot food to my books, so I wrote them off.
So there was one time in my life where I had to choose between housing and keeping my rpgs.
But that is not the usual condition, and some gamers just like to whine a lot. I mean, you can be pretty hard up in the West and still afford to game. Spend $4 at an internet cafe, go to John Kim's
list of free rpgs, download a light one which uses d6es and is 1-20 pages, spend $0.20-$4 getting it printed at the internet cafe, then go to a junk shop and buy some half a dozen d6es for a dollar or so. And so for under $10 you have some gaming. Shit, most gamers spend more than that on junk food each session
Obviously if you have a good public library nearby, or a good enough imagination to make up your own game system, you can do all that for free
If you are in the USA and out of college and can't afford a non-classic used BMW from Madonna's youth, you fucked up and need to spend less time gaming and more time getting a real job that pays real money.
Unless of course your goal is not simply to make as much money as possible for you. There are many other goals people have in life. For example, if it were a matter of money, few of us would get married and have a mortgage, let alone children. But lots of us have goals involving a home and a family. But those require money, so this is why married people sometimes pursue second degrees, or work in jobs they dislike.
For example, I have a friend who has a wife, a daughter and another on the way, and a huge mortgage. He's in a job where he earns a decent salary, but a salary which leaves them a bit tight financially - compared to their large debt and expenses. He works in IT, and could leave his current job and go to some start-up and earn 50-100% more - but the startup might be dead in 12 months, and he'd be looking again. He chooses long-term security over shorter-term income. To support one goal, he compromises on another.
We each have our own goals, pursue them in our own way, and if we want one thing, often must compromise on or leave out another. So that many of us are not earning as much money as we could.