f13.net

Link. (http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2651&Itemid=2)
(stolen shamelessly from digg.com)

New research shows up-to-date salary levels throughout the various sectors among game developers including artists, programmers and producers. The study published in the new issue of Game Developer, out this week. Research firm Audience Insights aided the study, which received 6,000 responses from game developers around the world.

PROGRAMMING

Technical Director: $104,738
Lead Programmer: $81,591
Programmer / Engineer: $73, 618

ART and ANIMATION

Art Director: $65,313
Lead Artist: $68,112
Artist: $61,065

GAME DESIGN

Creative Director: $72,125
Writer: $61,000
Game Designer: $54,777

PRODUCTION

Producer: $66,375
Executive Producer (all with more than six years experience): $127, 375

QUALITY ASSURANCE

QA Lead: $43,125
Tester: $29,722

AUDIO

Audio Director: $62,206
Composer: $60,093

BUSINESS AND LEGAL

Marketing: $76,667
Admin: $81,765
Executive: $106,590

And this is why working in game dev sucks.

Really? I'm in the salary range of a tester :) With 6 years of sysadmin experience + 25 more years of pc experience.

Public service ftl. I knew I should have stuck with sound engineering.

Yah but you also probably don't work 60-80hr weeks and get treated like a piece of crap by all the fanbois.

The only ones that make any money are the programmers and they definantly work 60-80hr weeks.

No offense, but salaries mean nothing unless they are considered in conjunction with the cost of living proximal to where the job is.  In rural America, those are great salaries.  In Boston or San Francisco, they're pretty terrible for someone with the experience and CV to land the position.

Yeah, what Nebu said.  I was boggling at those numbers, because they're so much higher than my own pay scale. (I'm around the QA Lead in a 40-hour a week job in the midwest where I actually do work 40-45 hours.)  Then I remembered the cost of living where most of them live and realized I'm better off.

Since it's a world survey, chances are fairly good that they are adjusted for region. The only question is which. I don't feel like paying the $3.50 to find out.

I don't blame you.  I was just reminding you to consider what Disraeli (http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/487.html) told us.

No wonder most games are bug ridden pieces of shit.

The above is a 100% positively true statement. What that survey doesn't tell you is that at least 50% of QA testers are $8 an hour interns.

Whoo, still below the median!

...though far closer than I was at Other Companies. You know something's wrong when your supervisor asks how much you're making, and when you tell him he physically recoils and blurts, "Oh my God, you're getting screwed!"

In a perfect world, game dev salary would somehow be nebulously based on the quality of the last game you made. For example, David Jaffee, rolling in cash. The people who made 50 Cent's Bulletproof? Flipping burgers with 50 Cent. We can call this agenda "tough love."

Edit: There would of course be a base salary of like $25k, but you can drop in experience levels from there if you're first game is REALLY SHITTY. So you might want to think twice about those life dreams of working for the American arm of Bandai.

Course, if you could demonstrate to the moneyhats that less bug riddled games sell substantially more, you might have a case for change.  As it is now, it just a matter of "what's the cheapest method of developing product X we can get away with".

I hereby proclaim my support for a new government agency, the Gamer Protection Agency, or GPA, to engage in product testing of all games prior to release and send the bug ridden peices of crap back to their makers until the can slap on a sticker, "GPA Approved", indicating they have less than 10% of their code containing bugs. Please note, this agency is not to be confused with the agencies responsible to checking decency standards have been followed, or gratitous overuse of the either the color "brown" or "smashable crates", or naughty words. 

Considering that video game revenue last year EXCEEDED movie ticket revenue last year, those numbers are FUCKING SHAMEFUL.

EDIT: And considering that a lot of those salaries are probably in California, where the cost of living is criminal, it's even worse.

I don't see any "associate" titles on that list. I can only assume all associate producers, etc. were too embarrassed to list their pay level.

OK I may get kicked in the crotch by some devlopers and members, or I just may be vastly underpaid, but those salaries don't seem unreasonable to me. For refrence, I work in NoVA so my living expenses are also inflated.

* Coders are right in line where they should be. Coding is hard (tm) and they work 60-80 hour weeks during crunch time. Commercial coders can make less or more.
* Game designers are a little low, but there are a lot of people who can come up with good, stable ideas as their profession, and the market is filled with eager people who love their job and are willing to work for less.
* Everyone knows QA is a cesspool that people try and forget exist.
* Everyone also knows 'execuitives' rake in the dough. Good ones can make or break a project.
* I don't know a lot about sound, but those salaries seem reasonable and in line when compared to what they could be doing - trying to make a living doing stage music, fighting long hard road doing studio development or sell your soul out to corperate doing mixing for TV/radio. You want crappy pay? Look at radio sometime.
* Art never pays for the average joe. There's a reason why we have the term 'starving artist'.
* I know nothing about business and legal, but generally as those sorts of people are fairly fungible across the spectrum of business the salaries are likely in line as well.

Your 'superstar' coder/designer/artist can command large salaries but the regular guy in the trenches is just middle class like everyone else.

Sounds about right.  Keep in mind those figures are averaged, so you would expect them to fluxuate between high/low cost of living areas, although on average I would expect more dev shops to be in higher CoL areas.

I agree with you completely. 

If it makes any of you feel any better, most of those salaries are higher than what I get paid as a professor at a Division I university. 

Oh, and considering what I get paid to run f13 right now (hint: I fall into the $0-$0 category), any of those salaries seem reasonable.

(For anyone actually doing that work though, we have a phrase for them, it's "getting fucked.")

The problem, obviously, is that people pay for buggy pieces of shit just like they pay for solid products.  They put their resources where it makes the most difference in sales, and you can't really argue that from a business perspective.  Paying your QA team more isn't going to fix more bugs, it's just going to give more money to undeserving retards.  Hiring better QA people... maybe.

But there's always that trade off for getting to live inside the Academic world, no?  I know people who could make three or four times the salary if they would work for a corporation, but they wouldn't even consider it because they know it would take years off of their lives.

Tolerating or even liking your job should trump salary.  Just sayin'.

It depends where in the academic world.  For in-house IT support, things are pretty cushy and I am happy with the trade-off of low stress for a lesser salary.  I could handle being a guest lecturer, but that is not a very well paying, or respected, position.  Were I a faculty member in the same research intensive department I would be absolutely miserable.  (Not that I would ever be capable of getting tenure short of having nobel quality work fall into my lap.)

I admit I trade low stress for salary. That and a nice 9-5 M-F work week. That allows me to post here.

I wasn't really complaining, just in the market to buy a house and depressed about it. I want to burn capitalists alive for making shelter an investment product, the motherfucking soulless ghouls.

If you weren't spending money on 61" TVs you'd be able to afford a house.

Ok.  I'm busted. 

Yes, I took this job by choice as I value my personal and intellectual freedom above the offers I've received in the private sector. I make significantly less than I could out in industry, but I enjoy a much better standard of life.  You're dead on here. 

As for developers, I imagine they're overworked and undercompensated for their efforts. Personally, I could never put so much sweat and passion into a project only to see business people turn it into a money-making monstrocity.  That's the kind of thing that breaks the spirit of anyone that's passionate about what they do.

I wasn't the only one to imagine a rickety "manufactured home" with a $2000 TV sitting on a milk crate, I see.

I'm thinking it was a $4000 TV when he bought it.

Those are great salaries.

If you never plan on having a family.

(This assumes said salaries are in California.  Checking out the math, I would have been able to survive with me and one dependant in Austin, Texas on 35k/year.  There would be a budget, but it would be comfortable.  But we couldn't go out buying $4000 TVs or anything.)

If your sofa is an old tire with a stolen Holiday Inn towel on top, the $4000 TV is practically free.

$35k a year is a very nice non-executive salary in the Cincinnati area.  It's "Mid-Middle class" so long as you and the Mrs. both have jobs.  It's Lower-middle if it's just you supporting her and yourself.  Making 42k a year I know I could support my family without selling the house if the wiffle stopped working, but we'd have to lose the amenities like cable, internet and the second car to do so.

I could live on $1200 a month and keep f13 running and easily create more fun than half of the designers in the MMOG industry. That's right, I'm throwing that gauntlet down. Anyone notice that the bulk of the gaming industry forgot how Fun works? Eh? Is it just me? Maybe it is.

To throw a reused stat up, the average US household income is $45k/yr.  I expect panhandling earns better in CA/NY, but it's a tidy sum here in SC.  Somewhere around $70-80k/yr (household) is enough to get a lake home and otherwise be comfortable, less if you wanted to be very tight with spending.

Schild wrote:
www.kleenex.com
Make that your home page  :-D

Ho ho, ZING.

I love how he saves it up, releasing at the right moment.

20k a year!  I will work for 20k a year in the games industry!

I will test!  I will write!  I will design!

PM ME NOW, OFFER ONLY GOOD THROUGH TODAY!!!!

Starbucks?

What does Starbucks have to do with the gaming industry?

Most games wouldn't get made without industrial-size quantities of caffeine?

Um yah, that's the tie-in. What Haemish said.

Actually, was just referring to your $1200/m comment. There are worse places to work.

Won't help you in the game industry but hey ...

There's some smaller dev houses here in Denver that might have some open spots if you want to move.

I never knew the pay scale was that low. It makes me appreciate my job that much more. (I work way, way less than anyone on that list and make between programmer and lead programmer money)

Biotech industry guys!

You, uh, you make cyborgs?

Poseidon 2, Schild 0.

At this rate he's not going to need those heavy hitters, he's going to pummel you into the ground all on his lonesome.  :-D

Those salaries sound reasonable to me if maybe slighly low. The fact that the industry makes a lot of money doesn't directly relate to how much a developer makes. The fact that I work for a $1.2 billion bank doesn't mean my salary should be $4mil a year. You have to think about how many people are really involved, marketers, support, mid-level management, etc... All those people are paid out of the same pot.

I would think those are probably the overall median range with some making more in CA and some making less elsewhere.

I'm a bit over $60k/year as a mid-level developer in the Cleveland area. I should get a nice boost in a year or two though as I'm currently training and am slated to become the ETL lead in our area of the bank.

I wonder how much the general counsels of gaming companies make, or even if most of them have a GC or legal department or if that gets taken care of by the parent company.  I know Sigil has at least one, since he posts about how wonderful the game is all the time at FoH every time a beta leaker proclaims that it is teh suxx0r.  Though he may be a MS lawyer now that I think of it.

Yeah, but you have to live in Cleveland.  :-D

My point about the gaming industry making so much money isn't that the salaries are terrible. They are terrible because the game industry practically requires you work unpaid overtime that other industries either wouldn't force on you or would compensate you for with performance bonuses. I don't hear much about performance bonuses at games companies. About the only bonus is they probably get to work 50 hours instead of 80 once the product is released, that is if they aren't laid the fuck off after the launch.

If the industry had to actually compensate for all the unpaid overtime, their profits would be WAY down. And thus, the workers get FUCKED. PROPER FUCKED.

6,000 devs around the world ? So they including devs in Czech Republic and Poland and the like ? Devs living in downtown Tokyo?

Be difficult enough to get a rough idea/guess of an average wage if like mentioned above it was for one country only. Let alone comparing wages in Tokyo to wages in Bratislavia.

Don't forget The Republic of Elbonia.

"Today, it is your turn to be the computer."

Just by way of comparison, the average, non-lead, mid-senior 'Programmer/Engineer' makes something in the 80-90K range outside of the game industry. And significantly more if you go the 'Capitalist Pig' 1099 route. And add even more if you are doing embedded C programming and such.

So yes, the game industry is well behind the curve on the Software Development scale.

And for extra bonus points, you probably work 20 - 40 more hour per week because you  get to work on Games!

Go You!

You don't work 20-40 hours more because you work on games.

You work 20-40 hours more because game companies are full of immature child-level thinking and procrastination and a completely lack of time management. Also, they're behind the curve in pay because most people at developers (not publishers) are spineless swine who will work for less to do something they enjoy. Now, I'm not saying they shouldn't work for less to do something they enjoy so much as they should demand more and be be less tolerant of constant pimpslapping from their publisher. Chinese Gold Farming operations are probably more efficient and better managed than most north American gaming companies.

You have a link on that one for me? Here's the link I found for 2004 stats from the bureau of labor statistics:

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_15Co.htm

Looks like your standard 'computer programer' makes around $66,480.

Look down one row, a commercial programmer that is the equvilant skill set of a game programmer would be Computer Software Engineer, Applications (games ARE applications, very complex applications), and the one below that (Systems Software) encompases the embedded C thingie he was talking about.

What kind of programming isn't done on applications?

JCL, SQL, ETL, etc... There's a considerable bit of programming that doesn't directly involve applications.


I would also disagree with you Murgos that ALL games programmers are Applications Engineers. Just becuase you are writing code for an application doesn't make you an Application Engineer/Architect. There's a wide gap between the two.

For example, writing a quest response system is basically a big If Then Else or Case statement, that's pretty low level programming and I wouldn't call the guy that codes in the gaps a Application Engineer.

What is it then?

I'm not being facetious at all - I'm not in IT or anything, so I honestly don't know.

One is just more senior than the other and the same applies to game developers -- coding up the 3d graphics engine or the networking code is more advanced than writing, say, the combat engine (assuming some sort of cheezy Diku-derivative) or the code to make the UI work.

Strazos,

JCL is Job Control Language. It's basically a series of instructions telling a mainframe computer how to run an application and in what filespace the IO is coming from/going to. There's a bit more to it but it's basically instructions for a computer to prioritize and run a bunch of jobs.

ETL stands for Extract Transform and Load. It's related to SQL. It's code that involves data handling. For a large company like mine (bank) there's a lot of data and a lot of data that needs to be moved around. That movement process isn't directly related to any sort of application.

SQL is the standard database language (Structured Query Language I think). It's the code you would write to insert, update, or delete data in a database. It can be part of an application but it doesn't need to be.

I would also consider a lot of Unix administrators to be part computer programmers as well given all the shell scripts and such they are writing on a daily basis to make Unix a little more usable for those of us that are unix challenged.

If you want to split hairs, sure.  But IRL most programmers just write crap that pulls from a DB and presents the information to someone, OR puts information into a DB.  Most game programmers though are either making an engine or are making tools so that others may interact with the engine, it's a different skill set and certainly much more rigorous.  The BoL didn't just make up those job distinctions, why don't you go find out what the criteria are they used?

Regardless the fact is that game programmers work harder for longer hours with more complex tasks than thier equivalent commercial sector job for less money.  I know guys that do fairly trivial programming for 120k a year and work bankers hours, sure it's boring repetative work but the amount of effort required to be good at it is no where near the amount of effort or knowledge required to be a good game programmer.

It's the BLS. Just letting you know is all....

Actually I doubt if that kind of thing is hard coded at all in recent games.  I would imagine there is a DB of some sort and a tool that is used to attach the text to objects and that the designers are actually the ones doing that dialogue stuff and the programmers are making (probably adapting or fixing, really) the tool to enable that.

edit:  Of course, I have no clue.  I don't do game programming and have never looked into it.

Maybe it should be BoLS?  :-P

I think we're talking about the same thing now and just coming to different conclusions. My point is I wouldn't consider someone who writes that tool to be an application engineer. That tool is a sub-system of the overall application. The application engineer would be the guy who takes the tool written by the programmer and integrates it into the overall system.

Does that make more sense?

Yeah, I guess I wouldn't call the guy fixing/adding features to the text dialogue tool an application engineer either.

Maybe I need to rethink how difficult game dev is.  10 or even 5 years ago a game programmer needed a lot of disparate skills to make something work, in today's age though I would guess that a lot of the stuff used in day to day development is prepackaged code that only needs to be adjusted or adapted when something 'extra' is called for.  You would still need to have at least one guy around who understands the fundamental theories of the OS subsystems (memory management, scheduling, graphics display, etc..) and how the engine interacts with that to make needed adaptions and to integrate the stuff done locally into the rest of the code but the vast majority of the big brain stuff is going to be done by the engine team, probably at another company.

Anyway, even if only half the horror stories I hear are true I still wouldn't want to do that kind of work.

I'm trying to remember a post from years ago, but I recall a red name on SWG mentioned that most 'programmers' there were actually script writers with very little coding experience.  They were using pre-made tools and various assets to create content.  If this is true for most games then the number of people working on actual code is rather small.

I wrote a few paragraphs about game designers versus programmers and why the two salaries were so different, but deleted it because those salary ranges are for single player games. Since it's come up, for the non-technical folk out there I wanted to say a few words about MORPG programmer/designers.

The technical designers/implementers in a MORPG need to be generally way, WAY more proficient than your average technical joe. The technical expertise required to create MORPG-style worlds is tremendous. In addition to all the talent required to create a single player game (OS, 3d game design, memory management fundamentals), to design redundant architecture that can support thousands of concurrent connections, the database to handle thousands upon thousands of transactions a second with sub-second response time, the programmers to design networking code so you don't see the inherent latency in game, fully integrated authentication/billing pieces, and the backend shit that no one sees but is just as important if not more so like hot backups, a patching/OS management system for hundreds of servers, a fully mature change/configuration management lifecycle, and custom communication code between all the servers requires a level of talent that's EXTREMELY rare and valuable even in the IT world. Most systems don't and can't hold to anywhere NEAR those exacting standards, and if you stuck the requirements for a MORPG in front of say a technical IT director in a fortune 500 company, he'd likely laugh his face off because almost NO ONE can nail it. And that's JUST for the talent. Add to that, just for the hardware and licenses, probably 1-2 million per active shard/world/whatever. I and a lot of people routinely work with hardware that costs more money than we'll see in our entire lifetime.

To get a bunch of guys who can code/create around each others' and the server's limitations is basically the dream team. You need people who have both breadth and depth because there are a LOT nuances in a system that big and you need to understand most (if not all) aspects of the system so that you can adjust to it. The problem is, as always, supply and demand.  If you don't pay you don't get people who can handle that type of high-end enterprise architecture. As Lum once put it, MORPGS are hard (tm).

Now, contrast someone who can do all that to a dreamer with a good idea and the ability to organize it logically into a bible-type format. To me, the differences in salary are no-contest.

Yeah everyone thinks there job is hard and no one else can do it...

I didn't see anything approaching rocket science anywhere in your description. Sounds like the sort of stuff any average developer would pick up on the course of working on a large scale project. The difference between a programmer and an Application Engineer is the fact that the Engineer understands all of it (even if they can't code it themselves) vs. a programmer specializes in one or two of those things and can build them from the ground up.

Then again maybe my perspective is skewed since I work for the regulatory (Op Risk) area of a 1.4 billion dollar bank. I'm guessing our criterion are a little more strenuous than your average MMOG that doesn't have to deal with FED, SEC, and OCC review, 24/7 systems, and the average joe who gets real angry when you mess with their money.

The art of programming computing machines is about nothing more than searching and sorting.

heh.  This is a recursive quicksort algorithm I wrote a while back for a specialized piece of hardware.  You say a lot with your little bit of nonsense.

Aye, and there's the rub.

Or more specifically, the difference between a trained writer and a producer or lead programmer who figures "anyone can write - we don't need to to pay someone else to do that."

Ah, yes, but do you make around say a lead programmer (81k)? If so then yes, the job is hard and you are compensated accordingly thus proving my point. Also, have you actually priced consultants who specialize in this stuff out? They won't even return your phone calls @ $100/hr. I do have a passing familiarity with bank systems and anyone who needs three-phase commit printers have serious custom technological requirements, it's true. You spend a larger majority of your time dealing with regulatory hurdles than a MMOG developer would, obviously, but you also have a massive amount of capital behind you that dwarfs even MMOG budgets. They are willing to pay that piddly extra few million dollars if it gives them more a better massively redundant critical infrastructure. Presumably that capital also goes into personnel salaries as well.

I'm not saying that MMOG is the end-all-be-all in technology, but it's pretty damn close. A MMOG implementation makes a single player game look like cake. People found that out, which is why the development cycle is so goddamned long.

@stormwaltz
That specific problem seems to come up a lot in 'why our game failed' postmortems. I remember it specifically in klingon academy, to name one of many.

Nope, I'm not to 80k yet. I'm still in the low $60's. Then again I'm also not really in that position yet. I'm the tech lead on our $250,000 - $500,000 size projects. This year I'll be leading my first $1mil + project. I'm hoping that next year I will get the promotion to Sr. level developer which should put me in that 80k range.

Depending on the speciality of the contracter we pay anywhere from $85/hour up to $315/hour (Sr. MS and IBM contractors go around that rate).