Gamasutra - Features - "Game Developer's Salary Survey" [08.31.01]


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By Jennifer Olsen with Jill Zinner
Gamasutra
[Author's Bio]
August 31, 2001

Introduction

Design

Audio

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This article originally appeared in the July 2001
issue of Game Developer magazine.

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Should I Stay or
Should I Go?

Development teams for market-relevant games can require anywhere from six to 35 people. Many senior people have reached the ceiling salary for their position. New technology is eliminating some positions, changing others, and creating new needs. Experienced developers are now finding that they have to make some serious decisions about their career. They might consider taking less money or relocating to a different part of the country where the cost of living is more reasonable.

New studios are starting up everywhere, and so jobs are cropping up all over the country. These small studios work for the big publishers. The publishers are trying to cut the cost of making their products, so they look to outside developers to make the cost of making a game more reasonable. The general trend of our industry today is the migration of all the great talent out into these new studios. Generally, game developers change jobs about every two years or at the end of a game cycle. Terrific programmers, sometimes whole teams, get disillusioned with the companies where they work and strike out to do it on their own. What entices people to make such a career shift? One factor is that the cost of living is so different all around the country. People who want to buy a house or raise a family are looking for jobs at game companies where the cost of living is lower and the pace is slower. Also, many of these outlying studios are trying to get back to the basics of making games, fostering a culture which seems attractive to many developers coming from large, corporate environments. — Jill Zinner

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Features

Game Developer's Salary Survey

Audio

The audio function in game development is so varied and so arcane to many other developers, is it any wonder so many professionals voluntarily assume the simple moniker of "audio guy"? Audio professionals might be responsible for audio engineering, sound effects design, musical composition, and working with the producer recording and editing voice-overs. It has long been customary for game developers to turn to outside contractors for their game audio needs, but as more and more companies are taking on multiple projects, more are finding the benefit of having at least one full-time audio professional on staff.



	Audio salaries per years of experience and position

Audio is another discipline in which experience clearly pays for our survey respondents. With experience, you can show not just your creative talent in a shipping product's audio, but also demonstrate through references on past projects that you know what it takes to get a complicated and very critical job done (often with varying degrees of direction from producers and designers) in the invariably tight timeframe required by the project.



	All audio

"I started working in the game industry 14 years ago. There was no money back then, we were just kids who were doing it for fun. So I guess having any salary is an improvement over those days." — Sound Director, California

Other Trends

The laws of supply and demand prevail in game development salaries. Higher salaries generally go to those who require more specialized skills and hence are harder to hire for, such as programmers, than in areas where supply exceeds demand, such as in art and design positions. However, the disparity in pay is not as gaping as those looking from one side of the fence to the other might have suspected -- only 6.9 percent difference overall between programmers and artists of all levels of responsibility and years of experience, and 8.1 percent between programmers and designers.



	Average salaries by discipline

Realities of supply and demand also help fuel differences in regional game development salary averages. For example, Northern California, which hosts a booming high-tech industry with a chronic shortage of skilled technical workers, offers higher salaries than regions where the competition for available qualified talent is not as stiff.



	Salary comparison between 1st- and 3rd-party studies

Only 6.0 percent of our survey's respondents were women, and their salaries were 0.7 percent lower overall than their male counterparts (or 99.3 cents on the dollar). This disparity is far better than women fare in the national average of just 76.5 cents on the dollar compared to men in 1999, as reported by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Labor.



	Across all game industry

Who makes what and why is just as controversial in game development as it is in other industries. Indifferent economic principles are at work alongside human desires for equity and fair recognition for one's contributions. For many game developers who couldn't imagine doing anything else for a living, however, compensation is just icing on the cake.



	Geographic Breakdown of Salaries

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