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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!
...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
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
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.
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.
$60K a year / 50 weeks per year / 80 hours per week = $15 per hour
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?
1) IGN is assuming that everybody in the game industry is working in CA because they're clueless like that.
2) $60k isn't much in CA.
Seriously, I know the entry level folks over here at EA Tiburon in Orlando aren't starting out at that.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I have quite a few friends working in the video game industry, they mostly started with a salary of 10-12$ 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
royalties
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HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!