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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."
Because since you'll be working 80 hour weeks, you won't have time to spend it!
As for stock options and royalties...yeah right. Carrot, meet stick.
Seriously, IGN is clueless.
What's the dollar-to-hour ratio? If you're making $100K and spending 100 hours a week to make it, it's not worth it.
Call it a flame, but am I the only one seeing the stupidity in that paragraph. They are KIDS for crying out loud! Let us see if they still are willing to work for free when...umm... they graduate or have a family. This author is a moron!
If you salary area is $60K, is your salary 244.95?
...and make $600 million. I always hated IGN and their half-hearted attempt to make a games site for each and every game that comes out. Nothing could compare to a site made by a dedicated fan, such as Shlonglor's Warcraft 2 page, which was built before this gamespy/ign/daily radar/plan revolution.
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++!".
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.
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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
It depends on where you live. In my neck of the woods (NE GA), $60k goes a long way. Out where most game programmers are located (CA coast), I'd hate to try to live off of that. When you're taking home $4000 a month (after taxes) and spending $2500 on rent or a mortgage payment, it doesn't look so good.
You're more likely to be a pro athelete than to be a game dev. Unless your diet centers around cheetos and mountain dew. In that case you have no chance at either.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
as it's the engineers at the various game companies that are driving the Ferrari's, Mercedes SL500's, and Lamborghini's.
First of all. How many engineers are game companies are driving top-end sports cars? And second of all, how many could afford them?
I mean, making $100,000 and driving a Lambo would probably mean parking it in front of a 1 bedroom apartment... and hoping someone doesn't walk along and key it.
I don't know about the US, but I'm a gamesprogrammer in the UK with 4 years or so games experience for a mix of companies.
:)
:D
My starting salary was £20k (somewhere around $35k-40k US I think), which is at the upper end of the starting range in this country. I've known people who worked in smaller companies in lower cost-of-living areas who started on much less.
Most companies that I've known staff at do *not* offer shares, or royalties, or even bonuses. Bonuses, where offered, are by no means guaranteed - I've never had one. I've worked on a finished game for which I might've received royalties, but you don't get them til at least a year after the game is released (and the company went bust before the game was released, lovely!), and there's no guarantee that the contract with the publisher will be such that the staff ever see any royalties even if the company does.
I've never worked for them, but the majority of games companies at least in the UK make GB/GBA/Mobile-phone games, not the big console titles. Even the big players (Rockstar spring to mind) don't pay out regular bonuses on time or at all.
Why do I still do it? Well, now I'm working at a decent company (Sony, if you're interested), I get to make *games* god damn it, it's fun!
If anyone has any more questions about working in games, feel free to reply
Game dev and music blog
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.
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
The hard part, in my experience, seems to be getting your foot in the door into the videogames industry in the first place. Every single job opening I've read that I saw and said, "I'm totally qualified for that -- all they skills they're looking for, I have", also then have one other requirement: either "Must have 2-3 years prior job experience" or "Must have credits on (x) previous console titles."
Well gee, if EVERY job position requires PRIOR JOB EXPERIENCE, how can you possibly EVER GET JOB EXPERIENCE if you can't get hired for NOT HAVING PRIOR JOB EXPERIENCE?
I wouldn't mind so much if it said "prior experience / credits preferred" (I wouldn't mind having to "prove" myself in order to get a job) but they all seem to say "prior experience / credits required" (where it seems like, even if you "prove" yourself, "well sorry, you haven't had previous work in this industry before". Two months away from graduating college and I'm starting to really panic over whether or not I'll be even given the chance to bring my experience into a job, over something that seems superficial and silly rather than anything related to competence in any given talent.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
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.
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? ]=-
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 metric that I've always used to guess how well a company pays its employees is the cars in the parking lot. I work at a major game company that produces 20 million dollar games. In our parking lot out of about 100 cars there are no Bmw's, one mercedes, one or two high end sports cars and the majority are grocery getter low end compacts.
The only people getting rich are the high up exec's, one of which rolls up in his bentley once a month or so for a few hours then leaves the office again.
Alright, you slashdotters really need to make up your minds. Either going into the computer industry is a bad choice or it's not. First, you say it's a bad idea because most jobs are being outsourced to other countries. Then you publish articles downplaying those claims, and saying companies are fighting to get CS grads and schools fighting to get more people into CS. You see, I will tell you all a little story of a boy who was turned off to his potential future as a programmer:
There once was a boy, aged 12, who was introduced to computers through a Christmas present (more of a "hand-me-down") and became interested in programming. He had to research for weeks just to learn what how to get a compiler on his Windows 95 operating system, and spent the next few months introducing himself to various open source programs. Fast forward about two years and you'll find him spending all the money he recieved every birthday and Christmas on those expensive $100 programming books at Barnes & Noble and reading them. You'll find him immersing himself in his own programming creations, very mature and sophisticated for a boy of 14 years of age. He loved programming! He thrived on it (and coffee). He just loved the idea of creating something out of nothing. Fast forward another 2 years: He now is interested in many fields of computers, such as operating system development, language development, game development. He owns books such as "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" and "Modern Operating Systems". He just begins to hear of this "outsourcing" epidemic. He's unsure of his future, but he continues to plan his life accordingly and wants to be a computer scientist. Fast forward, once more, another 2 years. He's created his school's first computer science club. It has approximately 20 active members and he lectures every week. He is now VERY unsure of his future. All the years of slashdot's warning to prospective CS students has finally gotten to him. The stories of unemployed CS grads and outsourcing and low paying EA-like jobs have gotten him worried. He now programs less, and is seriously considering majoring in Philosophy and English, because those are two other majors he thinks he would enjoy. "What happened," he sometimes asks himself, "why has it come to this?"
One year later he's been out of high school for a year and works at the local grocery store behind the butcher block because he was left stranded and confused. He didn't make up his mind about his future in time for college deadlines, and still reads slashdot and their conflicting outlooks on the future. If he's going to take any plunge he's going to do it with Philosophy and English. The liberal artsy-fartsy way that will at least give him a better understanding of the human condition before he dies of starvation.
P.S. Whether you believe it or not, the anti-bot image I had to type in was "overtime". Hah...
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
$60K a year / 50 weeks per year / 80 hours per week = $15 per hour
You're looking at a lot less than that after taxes. If you're lucky you're looking at 3,200.
Here in San Diego, if you have your CS degree and say, 2yrs of experience at $60k, you will find yourself at a crossroad: If you have good presentation skills, and have managed to teach yourself .Net/SQL Server/XML (because God(tm) knows they won't teach that to you at SDSU) then you should have no problem contracting for $60/hr or earning $75k+ once you move to another job.
Having 7yrs experience myself, I have come to realization that the easiest way to get a pay raise is to simply move to another company. Frequently updating your resume will remind you of how little you actually know in your field. Diversify, bitches.
If you choose to stay in one place, you can bank on a mediocre 3% pay increase annually, stock option carrot dangling, and work with the same technology you played with last year. Just my 2 cents, i don't mean to offend anyone. Mileage will vary.
If you think
Granted that most of the information presented in the article is either false or hyped beyond exaggeration, IGN is not entirely clueless. Their motive here is not to write a fact-filled article, presenting unbiased information to a crowd of prospective game developers.
What is it, then? To make money. Consider two things:
-This article is geared toward adolescents, and continues the marginal trend within America of promoting questionable possibilities because, survey says: kids like to dream.
-Checking just above the article, one will notice the banner indicating "Sponsored by Full Sail" in so many words. What is Full Sail, you ask? An imitation private college designed to produced talentless chum at the measly expense of $30k. Per year.
IGN is no more clueless than they are poor, but they definitely hope to take advantage of the fact that their userbase is indeed clueless. But what more should we expect from America's biased, profiteering media?
I grew up (mostly) near the Chicagoland area in a small town where every other male played guitar. All of us were in garage bands at one time or another and, of course, we all had aspirations of "making the big time". As I got older, I would sometimes wonder what I would do if my kid decided he wanted to pursue his dream of being a "rockstar". The answer is pretty simple if you give it some thought. To even have the remotest shot at such a career, you have to be an extremely talented musician (yea, I know, I just put a "flame me" target on my back with that one, but, really, the odds of a mediocre talent making it are a lot smaller than a genuine talent). So, if that is really his interest, I would let him study music. Odds are, he won't "make the bigtime", but he could be a studio musician, producer, etc. A lot of would be rockstars I knew eventually went the studio route. The point is even if he doesn't realize his dream, he's still picking up a marketable skill in a field he loves.
I see the same thing with computer gaming. To write games you need skills in math, physics, computer science, art, storytelling, etc. All very marketable skills. Seems like a no-brainer. Even if you don't write the next "DOOM", you've still got plenty of other options.
So, if my kid wants to get into the video game industry, I'd be inclined to support him.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
What you say may be true.
But game development requires more bizarre skills than most common types of development (enterpise applications, web applications, etc.)
It usually involves quite complex math skills, knowledge of physics and many obscure algorithmic techniques that most programmers are not familiarized with.
I'm not saying that one type of programmers is necessary better than the other, just that good game prgrammers are even harder to find than (for lack of a better word) 'regular' programmers. That might justify the higher salary.
1) IGN is assuming that everybody in the game industry is working in CA because they're clueless like that.
2) $60k isn't much in CA.
Seriously, I know the entry level folks over here at EA Tiburon in Orlando aren't starting out at that.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
People who make $100k a year do not neccessarily drive Lambo's either. In fact, I bet very FEW people who make $100k a year drive "great" cars - $100k a year in the US isn't ALL that much money. Especially if you're supporting a family.
Amen - in many/most parts of California, making $100K is barely enough to rent a halfway decent 3BR home and support a small family with a middle-class lifestyle. Heaven help you if you want to actually buy a home.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
I have quite a few friends working in the video game industry, they mostly started with a salary of 10-12$ 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
First off, anyone that tells you working in the games industry is a path to fame and fortune, slap them in the face. For 99.9% of people, thats a complete lie.
Sure, our company directors drive Ferraris, 911 GTs, Z4s etc, but the rest of us working class peasants are in 1.1ltr rustbuckets (and worse, some at our place are stuck with public transport!) And we are a driving / racing games company!
Best advice I can give to any games players that want to join the industry - DONT. If you enjoy gaming and love the idea of working on great games, people above you will see that, and get you working all the hours god sends on the back of your passion. Only join the industry if you don't really give a damn, then you can remain objective, work your employment hours and still have a life.
Bottom line, enjoy your games, don't become bitter and twisted like me, stay away from the industry, keep loving games, don't get involved.
royalties
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HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Either going into the computer industry is a bad choice or it's not.
/. to do pick the constant for you, rather frightens me.
No. The decision of whether to go into the computer industry or not is complicated, and there is no possible way you can reduce it to a simple good/bad value, especially as a generalization that applies to everyone since that seems to be what you are asking for.
Life is complicated. There are precious few equations in math that can be reduced to a constant. The equations that govern our lives in human society are not among them. But people demand that they be forced into single, binary values. This makes no sense, and decisions based on such nonsensical thinking fail. "Going into computers is a bad choice or it's not." "Getting lasik surgery is a bad choice or it's not." "You're either with us or against us." No! The universe is not a collection of binary choices. You have to think about and consider all the actual variables that make up whether something is true for you.
The fact that not only do you expect "should M go into computers?" to be reduced to a True/False constant for all values of M, but that you expect
He didn't make up his mind about his future in time for college deadlines, and still reads slashdot and their conflicting outlooks on the future.
So you're saying this hypothetical idiot was going to base his career choice entirely on Slashdot Groupthink(tm), but because there was no consensus and actually several sides to the story that required consideration, he was unable to make up his mind and became a grocer?
GOOD. We don't need another engineer who isn't capable of basic critical thinking and decision making, or who thinks every decision in life can be represented by a single boolean value. That isn't even true in programming, much less real life, so I doubt this person would in the long run be a good engineer anyway. I can only imagine what will happen when this fool tries to buy a house. "Variable vs fixed rate mortages... why can't you just tell me which one is better?!"
In the end, no, "us slashdotters" not need to "make up our mind". Slashdotters need to continue to hear about and discuss all the factors that go into these decisions so that each of us can make as informed a decision as possble. Not have that decision made for us.
The enemies of Democracy are