That may have been a factor but it don't think it fully explains the sudden "snap" downward to levels lower than 20 years before. Kudos though for actually addressing the question of what caused the sudden change, rather than just focusing on the general climate of 1984 for nerds.

An interesting thought, however I would argue that the vast majority of programming jobs at the time were not with game companies but at a bank or insurance company maintaining some LOB app.

Indeed but writing a game was something you could do in school. I know I was inspired by news reports of teenagers getting rich from games they'd written.