Slashdot Mirror
IGN Talks Games Industry Salaries
WeebMac writes "IGN has a new career-themed section and one of their first stories is about the earning potential available to those who make their careers in the gaming industry. From TFA, 'Beginning programmers, whether you're working on tools, gameplay, networking, audio, AI, or animation, you can expect to start off with a salary in the area of $60K with the potential for more in the way of sales-based royalties or bonuses or stock options depending on the particular company you've been hired by."
Nevermind what it will do if you want to have a family life. Done that once, now I'm a freelance contractor and working on my own business ventures. If you go into the games industry looking to get rich as a programmer, you are insane. This is an industry where the peasants (programmers, engineers) REVOLTED. I can't think of another example.
n G=Google+Search&meta=
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=ea+lawsuit&bt
Think about that.
If you're doing it for the love of the art, do it for a hobby. Otherwise, I admire your guts.
Free advice for those of you with mad opengl skills and a mathematics background - double score if you have a mathematics or engineering degree.
- Go read a book on "Data Visualization"
- Go read a book on "Geographic Information Systems"
- Go read a book on "Signal Processing" (FFT, etc)
- Brush up on data structures relevant to the above.
Fire some resumes around to oil companies, insurance firms, financial trading companies, mining companies, etc etc loaded up with buzzwords. Make your programming skills secondary to the buzzwords.
Profit. My $0.02. I paid for my univesity degree writing 3D GIS systems software in OpenGL - had I have tried to do so writing games, I would probably be living on the street.
..don't panic
Also, due to the incredible supply of people that want to work in the games industry you'd expect the average salary of a game software developer to be less. I know in the company I work for starting SW developer salary is around 55K right out of college. In any event, it seems that their numbers for SW engineers is a bit high.
$15 bucks an hour.
Assuming you work 80 hours a week, and you get time-and-a-half overtime, you only need to make $12 an hour. If you're competent, you can make more than $12 an hour managing a Burger King.
For further comparison: Most contractors are able to bill for over $40 an hour, in many cases more than this.
Bottom line is this: If you're working mandatory overtime, there's a line where it'd be better to go sling burgers.
The statement in the article is not that stupid. First of all, if you look at the number of adults playing games, it's incredible. Secondly, even if you are not playing games, and if you are a computer science or ECE graduate, the appeal of working for a game company, compared to programming a credit card processing system at a bank is quite high.
On the other hand, the part of the article that I find suspicious is their figure of $60 grand. I spent a summer as an intern at a certain big game company, doing research in machine learning. Granted, that is not a software engineering position, but I would expect that my salary was higher than that of a programming intern. For one, I have a Master's in computer science. With that in mind, the amount of money they paid me was way below $60,000/yr. And from talking to some of my coworkers, this is indeed the situation - the game companies can get away with paying lower salaries just because making games is a cool job. I know that interns get paid less than full-time workers, and I don't have an exact figure on the entrance salary of a software engineer at that company, but I would be very surprised if it were $60k.
It's always a trade-off of salary and doing what you like in the software industry. As a senior game developer you can make 80-100k but you will be working 50-70 hours a week and even weekends. Being a senior software developer in a financial or banking corporation will get you 90-120k and 40 hour work weeks, but the sheer boredom on working on financial apps needs to be considered. So the bottom line is do you want to do what you love and become a hamster in a wheel or will you grow think skin and work on tedious and boring applications for stability, more free time, and better options/bonuses?
That is the question that most software engineers ask themselves and a heavy factor is if you have something outside of work that matters a lot to you (family, involved hobby, etc).
Dilemma indeed.
I've been working on games since leaving university in 1994... 3DO, PS1, PS2, XBox, Sega DC, Nintendo 64, PC, in both programmer and lead programmer positions. I hit $60k last year.
*speechless*
I mean, am I just horribly underpaid, or are these figures wildly inaccurate, or just vastly inflated Californian levels?
Good to know I'm a beginner. Makes me feel a little younger.
A lot of times when they say "prior experience required" they actually mean preferred. This is especially true for recent college grads - I am a senior in college myself, and I have had at least 1 interview where the job listing said "3+ years of experience." I don't know why they say it if its not totally true, but don't let those requirements stop you from sending them your resume.
He did.
:)
He works for blizzard and creates many of the strategy pages they create for their games. He goes by Nebu, short for that whole name of the matrix ship that I can't spell
$60K a year / 50 weeks per year / 80 hours per week = $15 per hour
I'm calling out your bullshit! I make $50k/year as a programmer in Orange County (high cost area). I can afford a decent 1 bedroom apartment (700 sq feet), investments, 401k, health & dental insurance, my truck, 2 motorcycles (track and street), and a project car. If I cared to for some reason, I could have my girlfriend move in and only money she'd need to contribute would be anything to go out shopping with.
It's not a high-end life, but it's certainly not "scraping by" nor is it in a bad area (I live 15 minutes from work). That seems to be the norm for this area.
I will agree that if I were making this much in the midwest, I'd own my own home by now but that's the price of gorgeous weather, women, and scenes.
I have quite a few friends working in the video game industry, they mostly started with a salary of 10-12$ an hour, SOME of them got promotion and now have 32-36K$ salary, and that's canadian money. The argument being that so many people want to do this job that if they aren't happy with their salary they can go look elsewhere, everybody is replaceable. Problem is, the game industry want a bigger pool of people to draw talent from so they ask their friend to write BS articles about how programmers start at awesome salaries, young impressionnable to-be-students pick up private school courses (cause they are better, or so they say) at 12-20K$ per year, those school then make a crapload of money, about 10-20 students get jobs at the end of the year (out of an average of 250 student per school). Most of these jobs, if not all, are as game testers, not programmers. After a few years they get to program a bit, by then only 2-5 student of the original 250 are still in the business at the above mentionned salary. In a few year maybe one of them will get promotted to head programmer or something like that and will get the nice salary. Meanwhile hundreds of students get out of school with an enormous debt with no possibility of following another course (having expended most of the possible loan limit imposed by the government, 25K in Canada) and no interesting job to pick from except multimedia houses where they will get paid a meager salary to do a very uninteresting job. I have worked in one of those school, during 3 years and I got out because of this. The industry is completely saturated and those kind of articles are extremely evil by nature because they help to sell unatainable dreams to impressionnable young students. This is the kind of BS article that make me proud of not having IGN in my bookmarks.
Don't believe the hype