I'm on the same boat as most of the other responses here.
I work full time doing database consulting but would love nothing more than to make my dream games all day. But with life costing so much money it is hard to just jump and do that, and it is even harder to try and balance my full time job with trying to make a full fledged game on the side...and keep the girlfriend happy all at once.
That's why I like the idea of smaller games monetized to try and bring in a steady (but small) amount of income to warrant the extra time put in to make more games.
Also my biggest thing is the fear of failure. It's easy to pump out small games and if they don't do well it's just..meh on to the next. But when you commit to a large game and then no one buys or downloads it...it's pretty painful.
In the end of the day I think most of like games enough that I wouldn't say we are all just in it for the money. There have been hard days where I wanted to give up but then I realize it really IS my passion and it's almost impossible to give up on that.