If you are over qualified, like having published several games on your own, it's not like they don't think you can do they job, they might think you will get bored and miserable.
I've personally come across this dilemma when hiring people. My own take is that's none of my goddamn business and if the person is the most qualified for the job then it's theirs for the taking.
Some day I'm actually going to try this in an interview.
Interviewer: "Why do you want to work for us?"
Me: "Honestly, I don't want to work for anybody because I have too much other stuff I'd much rather be doing with my time. But I need an income to sustain myself so, if I'm going to work, I want to work here because I think it'll be easy, provide decent benefits, and it's a 20 minute bike ride from my house."
It might be worth trying when you are already have another solid job in the background :) It could be that you've hit the one company that appreciates honesty, but generally I think most don't love it.
I don't think is optimal, either. It's not worth investing in onboarding someone, getting them situated in a team, then having to tell everyone a few months in that the person quit. If that seems like a very likely outcome, it makes sense to avoid it.
My experience is the most impressive people are significantly less likely to quit early. If they where doing a lot of interesting things in their free time they either become engaged with interesting projects at work or put in a solid work week and then go home to have fun with their own projects.
Albert Einstein for example worked for several years as a patent examiner while developing special relativity. Sure his contemporary physicists mostly worked in academia, but teaching is as unrelated to research as everything else yet they still did it.
Do people really pass on candidates that often because they're too impressive? Overqualification in general seems like the kind of spectre that I just can't see translating to the real world.
Not an automatic rejection, but it certainly requires a conversation. I recently had to go back to a candidate to triple check that she really, really was fine not leading a team anymore, with no timetable on when that might happen again. After a few days, she withdrew. We were bummed, because she was great, but we had suspected it wasn't really what she was looking for.
Sometimes that's the case, though. I've led teams before, and I don't mind going back to just head down focused on code again. Leading people tends to be more lucrative but also dulls the coding blade.
That's EXACTLY the reason I'm in my current job. I got asked several times whether I want to be a team leader, product owner or even assistant VP of engineering, and if I'm sure I only want to be a programmer.
And I said to the director of engineering who recruited me, more or less this:
"I can do all those and be rather good at them, too. But right now I want to focus on my physical and mental health so I want to work as a senior programmer with minimum supervision who takes ownership of big features or refactorings, and to be knee-deep in the code. All other soft skills that I have I only want to utilize to become the best colleague that you have."
My honesty was highly appreciated and I got an immediate job offer. I like the job. It's relatively chill, the colleagues are nice, the challenges are doable, and there's almost no pressure. I am mostly okay working for the company.
So long story short, I completely agree with you: sometimes you need a chill job so you can focus more on your life.
That would be a perfectly fine reason! Ideally this comes out in the interview process, for example if the candidate is asked why they're leaving their previous role and says that work/life balance was an issue. As long as their needs match what you're offering, great.
The thorniest situation is the overqualified, currently unemployed candidate. That person is often not trying to make a lifestyle change, but instead looking to pick up a paycheck for a few months until something better comes along (for good reason!).
Making games doesn't mean they're financially successful or making bank. Several of those I made were released as free Flash games back in the day, for example. And yet even those were more popular than some games I worked on professionally for companies while in the industry.
So now I do enterprise development for my day job and work on games on nights and weekends. And enterprise development isn't inherently boring either.
Programming is still programming, in both games and enterprise software there are times where you just need to power through easy boilerplate with some music or a podcast on, and other times where it's an intricate puzzle you have to mull over in silence, do some research or experimenting on, ask your colleagues for their opinions or insight, etc.
Being a good engineer goes beyond being good at coding.
Many great coders suck at communication or are just not nice to be around.
I've seen amazing "coders" not being hired because they can't have a good conversation during the interview. I'm sure they're the same ones that complain about interviews being too hard.