Many, many industries are moving towards independent contractor based work because it allows them to provide considerably less benefits in the long term while still maintaining most of the productivity needed in short bursts.

The only reason why many didn't in the past was that the work was too specialized and all those extremely talented people had negotiation power to just take their talents elsewhere and be gobbled up.

Now the majority of game devs can barely scrape into companies on peanuts and are barely considered worth keeping between projects. The big names for sure get to be actual employees, but the rest are catch and release unless they impress one of those big names. And I'd wager a lot of them are contracted by the same company consistently, but kept as contractors just to cut costs on supporting them between releases.