It's just a phase....Any sufficiently advanced civilization, after a while, will give up on space exploration. Maybe send a few probes here and there, to collect some extra rocks missing from their collection.

There is only so many Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Nebulas, Planets and Comets to study and after you have studying a few million, they all look the same. Once you've seen one supermassive black hole bend light and time, you've seen them all.

You will grow out of it....

Inspiration. People work hard on things that inspire them. That inspiration leads to advances.

> why is game dev worth devoting the massive amount of man hours and natural resources to?

GPUs were arguably made for games and now they'd enabled all kinds of non-game things.

I don't remember all the things that space exploration has brought but a quick search brings up this from JPL

https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/original_images/infogr...

What is the real gain? Resources. There are a ton of resources up there. Knowledge. A lot of things we have today we have because of our previous space race. But the real reason... It is virtually free. The budget is almost 0 compared to everything else the government does.