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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."
I tend to think the numbers are lying one way or another.
Either it's an EA kind of environment where 60,000K may be cheap for such devotion, or gaming is in the equivalent of the tech bubble.
Un-related but funny story. I have some aquiantances (sp?) here in L.A. that write scripts and they actually get evaluated (paid too) by people who can get movies made. The latest overwhelming reply to their work has been, "It's a great script, but we're really looking for something based on a video game.."
True story.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Nevermind that the "beginning" programmer has likely already worked on many other games, has a solid background in programming of various languages / APIs, and is able to produce solid quality code.
Sounds like they're souping up "beginning" as "I know how to write a cout in C++!".
Shit, from what I've heard from friends in the industry, it's more like 30-35k. (Most them living here in TX, with a fairly average cost of living on the national scale. [at least the cities where these folks were -- austin, dallas, and houston -- are within 10% of the national average last I checked... it's surely cheaper to live in places like Crockett or Buda or Nacogdoches or whatever, but you don't find many games studios in places where the time zone is still "1952".])
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I did both man, Back at school I wrote medical visualization software for virtual reality systems. Sure it paid the bills, but it wasn't as satisfying and the work environment was much more uptight (Researching PHDs aren't the most fun group of people to work with).
Now, I work in the game industry and my hours are extemely flexible and the atmosphere is much more laidback. I find that the quality of work I am doing is much better now that I am happy. I make a very good wage (I'm not rich, but I never have to worry about money) and always seem to have the time to take vacations and such. So hey, I guess there's 2 sides to every coin.
Salary surveys are one of the worst examples of statistics. First off you have to be EMPLOYED. The average salary for a football player is say 4 million. Now out of the millions of people that try to get into professional football how many? Telling me people in the game industry are earning $60k a year means nothing if you can't get a job in te industry. Further more the cost of education, hours worked, and benefits compensation are left out largely. In addition salary surverys are biased as they ignore laid off, unemployed, and displaced employees in the industry.
Salary Survey question example:
How much do you make an hour? --- $30 and hour.
As far as the survery is concerned I make $60,000 a year. But if I get laid off for 6 months do they adjust that? Nope. It's too irrelivant to use salary figures. IF wonk A get 60k a year and wonk B gets 70k who makes more? Well Wonka A pays nothing for health insurance and Wonk B pays 12k a year for health insurance. What about deductables and 401k\b performance. Stock options. I know plenty of Eron employees that could talk about the real wage of a staffer just as EA employees could rant a bit on it.
Tired of surverys that mean nothing....
my 2
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
People throw out the contractor figure a lot. Hell I've billed 150+ an hour for certain types of programming and database work.
That is NOT the same as making $150 an hour, working a full time job. Not even remotely close. You're lucky if you can pull ten hours a week at those rates, assuming you lack big industry contracts, and it's unlikely you'd be able to do THAT two weeks in a row.
And then there is all the work you have to do, but can't get paid for. Marketing, billing, accounting, keeping your own equipment and skills up. Travel time...Sometimes you can bill for it, sometimes you can't. If you can't, then you're talking an hour or so wasted in transit. Nothing worse than having to drive in, and finding out the problem is a user error that takes 5 minutes to fix...Even if you normally bill at a hour minimum, if you charge someone $180 bucks for typing one command, they'll never call you again...I always charged a 40 dollar call fee, but that's not worth the damn time it takes to get there and back.
Freelance is nice, if the work comes in by itself. If it doesn't, it can be hell.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Generally speaking, this article is not that accurate, as are most "salary surverys," where people typically respond with what they *should* be making, not what they do make. Also, he didn't note how long it takes (years -- your whole career, if you're *successful*) to get from the starting salary to the final salary. Nor did he note the salary disparity between developers and publishers. People who work at independent developers typically make less, but have more freedom and input into what they do, versus being "animator 957" or whatever, so it's a tradeoff.
Also, I didn't like the outmoded description of "marketing stiffs" or the cheap shot about producers: "...someone who's merely making schedules, managing the talent, and dealing with the annoying marketing stiffs." Yeah, that sounds easy, huh? Maybe he should try it! Obviously I came from the production side, and I would have liked to see some description of the differences in jobs between different types of producers, but I guess it was just a quick overall survery and not an in-depth thing.
Anyway, IMHO the reality of making games today is a far cry from the shots he takes in the article. If there is an "us versus them" relationship between marketing and development -- or between any develoment disciple (art and engineering, design and production, production and art, etc), your game's sales, sequel potential, and eventually your career are going to suffer. Good teams work together and while there's always friction, it's the job of the discipline leads -- and that worthless producer -- to minimize it. That's not to say there aren't bad marketing people, or irritating artists, or incompetent producers, all of whom suck and make everyone's life difficult, but there shouldn't be this default adversarial relationship there.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Obvious: If you're a new college grad willing to work 100 hours a week for mediocre benefits, there are companies willing to take you up on your offer.
Not so obvious: If you're a new college grad and are NOT willing to work 100 hours a week for mediocre benefits, there are still companies willing to take you up on your offer. You just need to be good at what you do, and willing to ask for what you want.
Seriously. If there's one group that truly, truly SUCKS at contract negotiations, it's geeks. There's enough money in the industry to pay competent people a good wage, but if you cream your pants at the very thought of EA sticking you in a mildewy basement for $20 a week, that's what you're gonna get.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Anyway, IMHO the reality of making games today is a far cry from the shots he takes in the article. If there is an "us versus them" relationship between marketing and development -- or between any develoment disciple (art and engineering, design and production, production and art, etc), your game's sales, sequel potential, and eventually your career are going to suffer.
I agree. I worked in marketing for a game publisher for 3 1/2 years (no, I do not consider myself a marketdroid; that's why I quit), and quite honestly there was no adversarial relationship whatsoever between us and the development arm of my company. In fact, our developers liked some of our marketing ideas so much that they ended up incorporating them into the games! (I'm sure at least a few of you guys know what that link is really referencing...)
We also worked with outside developers fairly often and in those cases there was often a bit of push-pull. Depending on the contract, sometimes it would end up being a case of "whatever we say goes", sometimes it was the reverse. (A few times we just had to suck it up and do things we knew were idiotic.) Obviously, when two companies that work together have been doing their thing with success individually for a while, both sides are going to think they know best.
But internally, things were always pretty smooth between the marketing and development sides. And even new acquisitions would get along with us pretty well. The fact of the matter is, if there's dissension at one part of any company vs. another part, that dissension is going to eventually end, one way or another. No company can have an internal rebellion going on at one particular division or another; if necessary, heads will roll and there were times at my company when they did.
And as far as the salaries go, the $60K starting figure is a tad high but not completely ridiculous. Salaries are not the problem in the video game industry. It's the working environment and employee treatment that are the problems.