If I pursue a degree in atmospheric sciences and meteorology, how difficult will it be to secure a position in the field and how successful can a meteorologist become in the workplace?

By all means tank the gamer career. As the climate changes, meteorology will be front and center in explaining all the global and severe weather coming soon to this planet.

Good to see you came to your senses regarding gaming. Get up. Go out. Walk or ride a bike to a hilltop nearby and appreciate the fact that you are healthy enough to do so. Sitting in front of a tube all day will simply destroy your humanity.

There are, and will continue to be, jobs for non-broadcast meteorologists. However, you want to get a degree in atmospheric sciences, not necessarily meteorology. The key is that most of the non-broadcast meteorology jobs doing atm. sciences in the next few decades will be related to predicting the effects of global warming on regional climates. This is a huge area of concern for industries like re-insurance (who want to know flood/drought statistics), transportation planning (airlines will likely start to care as severe weather impacts flight operations), probably defense industries as well. Offshore oil production, and resource exploration/exploitation at high latitudes will also need predictive capabilities of weather and climate as the poles warm continue to warm up. They don't care yet, but in a decade or so fisheries management will be looking for people who can model the impact of warming on ocean ecosystems, and getting the atmosphere right is a big part of that.

The kinda nice thing is that if you are into coding, development of regional climate models that have better sub-grid scale parameterization of the physics will be a key thing. So you could combine your coding with atm. science (although coding a big numerical model is not as sexy as coding up games (there's not cool real-time gui stuff, it's all flat-world fortran and huge data files)). So, atm. scientists can be successful, and there are a lot of opportunities. It would be an interesting career.

Good schools for atm. science are University of Wisconsin, University of Colorado, Colorado State University, Penn State Univ., Univ. of Washington, Oregon State University, and MIT (that list is in no particular order). If you care more about air pollution, UC Irvine is also good. I'm probably leaving out a couple from that list.