My guess is that he started his own game dev thing that will fail in a couple weeks when he gets bored of it, and realizes he's not as good as he thinks he is.
EDIT:
My reasoning for this is that an established video game development firm will generally not hire someone who does not possess a degree in something like CompSci (which clearly a 17 year old doesn't have) and also has not shipped any previous products (unsure what lame tasks you were doing in your previous "company").