Slashdot Mirror
Entry Level Game Industry Salaries
An anonymous reader writes "Game Tycoon has posted some informal information about entry-level salaries for students entering the video game industry." From the article: "Students who applied for engineering jobs seem to be getting offers in the 70s -- in some cases, the high 70s. The same students got offers approximately 10K higher from companies in other industries; i.e. Oracle, Microsoft, etc. So the gap between game company offers and non-game company offers appears to be narrowing for engineers. In general, I was amazed at how high the offers were!"
Half the reason I chose not to go into games was the crappy salaries, half was the crappy hours and the other half was my lack of mathematical ability.
This article only talks about several MIT students that the author has experience with - they may be exceptionally bright, motivated students, and they tend to get higher offers. I live in LA and my boyfriend's first gaming job only paid 55K - not 70.
If you're from MIT, you'd better start at 70K. You'll never pay back your loans at 30K. Hell, MIT English majors probably start at 30K.
The article mentions engineers and producers, with the latter getting offers about half as much as the former. Can someone explain the difference between these two jobs?
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
The opening line of the article was "I was speaking to some MIT students."
So basically, these salaries are probably inflated because they're from MIT and can fetch top dollar. I just graduated with an MS in CS (not from MIT) and I was getting offers in the high 60's,low 70's from Microsoft, IBM and the like. I didn't talk to any game companies so I can't say anything about that, but don't expect to go into CS and come out from any school other than an MIT or CMU and fetch high 70s. If you're going for a BS, I wouldn't get my hopes past 60, MS past 75. There is a ton of hiring going on right now though, so you might get lucky. Everyone and their brother is hiring.
The linked-to story is just some guy babbling on a blog about how he chatted to `a few` people. Perhaps if some sort of representative survey had been carried out, and the terms he is using were slightly more well defined this article would have some merit.
At one time over 90% of US actuaries lived within 100 miles of Hartford, CT. Pay level statistics reflected the high cost of living there.
I guess this explains how some of the companies can make such a great deal of profit and still continue to put out low quality, buggy games.
Look at Sony Online Entertainment for example. I'm sure every one of their developers are paid pretty good - especially after reading this article. However, the quality of code coming out of companies like this is atrocious. A lot has to do with the aggressive timelines I'm sure and the long hours - but in the end some of the things decided upon are just stupid! I'd also like to know what game managers make in comparison to managers in other genres.
Does this take into account the bonuses many game companies give for on-time release dates? Subscriber based pesudo profit sharing?
I work at a big video game publisher.
Nobody hires entry level game developers.
You have to have tons of experience developing 3D games to get a job, it helps to have a shipped title, a finished big freeware project can also be helpful.
Video gaming is the hardest industry to get into. You dont see undergrads writing a dbms before they try to apply at Oracle and Sun.
And 70,000$ is not realistic. sorry.
Gamasutra regularly runs surveys on game industry salaries, the problem is I can't find the data.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
High $70k salaries in the western side of the US where cost of living is high. Over on the south/east side, it is around $50k average. However the burn-out rate for the game industry seems to be around 5 years due to the large number of hours. But why get paid $70k a year when you work 60 hour weeks (or more)? You actually make less per hour than someone working $50k salary at 40 hours a week.
...in the UK:
on graduating, most games companies would not take on recent graduates, and required a minimum of 12 months experience and a published title. How to gain 12 months experience and publish a title when nobody will hire you is left as an exercise for the reader.
I eventually landed a job in one of the most expensive parts of the UK to live in (Surrey), earning £20,000 - at the time approximately $30,000 - which I'm told was a decent wage for a graduate programmer at the time. This was less than the average national wage which was £24,000 or thereabouts if I recall correctly. Other graduates from my university class going to work for investment banks or web companies were getting offers of up to £35,000 or thereabouts, and the ones who've become sysadmins rather than programmers all earn more than me even now.
The games industry isn't one where you go for high wages. You do it for the love of games, and then because even if you wanted to change career paths it's tricky when you don't have "serious" coding experience...
Game dev and music blog
Did anyone else read that as 70 silver? or have i spent wayyyy too much time playing WoW? :)
~Should i be worried when the real world starts lagging?
$70K starting for industry work in engineering? Surely you jest.
I graduated from UF with a BSEE/BSCEN this past year, and a MSCEN this year, and my minimum starting salary, not in a large city, mind you, was $79K, albeit with a few DoD contracts under my belt. I'm fairly certain that MIT graduates, even at the undergrad level, would qualify for beginning salaries well over $80-90K, especially in the Boston-Cambridge area.
I'll go with development of other software and systems before games. The thing is, from what I've heard, even if a company like EA isn't breathing down your back forcing long hours on you, game development takes a lot of dedication, more so then the development of a lot of other types of software. And this will no doubt increase even more with the complexities being brought on by new systems that must sap every single CPU cycle possible from multi-core systems. I can produce decent code at a decent rate (for someone still in college), but between EA and the HL2 developers blog, I've seen enough. Anyone here work at a game dev company and can vouch for the dedication they have to put in?
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
thats BS none of the game companies pay over (most not even close to) 50K in my area (houston texas)
thats the whole reason i got out of the games industry was the pay was so lame, and the hours at most game companies are terrible
The fellow who wrote the original blog entry has a serious lack of contact with reality. Let me try to inject some:
I am speaking as someone with over 30 years experience on top of a MSCS degree who has worked in many industries including the game industry as a programmer and technical director.
Someone with a degree in computer science or a closely related discipline has about a 50% chance of ever being able to write production level code in a commercial environment. My experience is that math majors have nearly as good a chance to become production programmers. English major (especially poets) and archeologists have about a 30% chance of reaching the same level of skill.
(People with degrees from expensive private schools usually figure out that they are never going to earn enough as a programmer to pay for their kids to go to the same expensive private schools and bail into higher paying areas after only a few years. They rarely stay around long enough to become really good programmers. There are, of course, many exceptions to that observation.)
OTOH, someone with a degree in any technical field has less than a 1% chance of becoming a successful entrepreneur. And only about a 10% chance of becoming a successful manager in any environment. A producer is an entrepreneur and a manager. The skills needed to be a producer are very different from the skills needed to be a programmer.
So, if I hire a fresh computer grad to be a programmer there is an even chance that that person will produce revenue for my company. If I hire the same person to be an associate producer there is very little chance that they will ever be good for anything but fetching lattes to meetings.
No wonder the pay for entry level producer is so low. In fact, I was surprised it was so high.
Stonewolf
/didnt' RTFA
:)
I remember seeing a job posting for LucasArts for Quality Assurance. It was rather small(40K?) and I believe it was in California. Needless to say I wasn't chomping at the bit to work THERE.
So what's the average salary of QA people in video games? Do they make more than the janitors?
Sorry to be a bit off topic here, but what are people that are new grads and Computer Engineers/Firmware Developers making in Canada?
I gradded in 2004 with a B.Sc in Software Engineering and another which was a combination of Telecomm and Computer Engineering.
Right now I'm making about $33K. I started off as a web developer, but now I do network layer programming for servers and microcontrollers. My company is pretty new and a startup.
The cost of living differences can be HUGE between metro areas, especially when it comes to housing. For example, the same house here in a semi-nice NW suburb of Atlanta is 20-30% less expensive here than it would have been in an equivalent suburb in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, and cost of living in the Twin Cities wasn't all that high to begin with. You can find 2500 square foot houses here with basements and nice yards in a convenant community (usually with community tennis courts and pool) for $200,000, and that's just a few miles outside of the 285 perimeter. Try that in Seattle. :-)
This might be an interesting read, and this might be as well.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Tell me about it. My grandmother lives in a dilapidated "house" (really detached servant's quarters for a long-gone 1920's "villa" next door) on a tiny lot on the edge of South Los Angeles (AKA "South Central"), and it's been appraised at $300K. Insanity.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
I'm working on my masters in CS right now. When I was an undergrad, you could ask anybody in the CS department what they wanted to do with their degree, and I'd estimate 75% of you would say they wanted to work in some kind of area related to gaming or graphics.
It's only natural that a field with that many people clamoring to get a job will pay somewhat less. It's supply and demand.
See: http://web.mit.edu/lit/www/
Note that you cannot get just an English (or any other humanities) degree all by itself. You have to either double major in a science or do a joint major, which is pretty much two beefy minors, one in the humanities major, the other in a hard science.
do it because you love it, or start writing inventory control programs. Being a game programmer is a lot like being a porn star. From the outside it looks all glamorous and exciting, but once your in the industry you realize pretty quickly that its almost more work than its worth.
Yeah, but Seattle is a genuinely nice place to live, whereas Minneapolis is a frozen hellhole, and Atlanta is only livable if you're black.
And if you could please spare me any of your flames about marketing, etc. Its a necessary evil, and just because some companies are evil when it comes to marketing, that doesn't mean they all are.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
If you say so. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
2003
2002
2001
And yes, I said annual, and the most recent result I could find was 2003. I think the 2005 results are still being tallied? And 2004? Must have been a bad year...
I am the very model of a modern major general!
Why not? Finally a positive use of Anonymous Cowardness on Slashdot. ;)
I am an artist with 3 years of experience, several smaller games and one AAA title from a big name dev. I just took a new job at $54k a year in the southern california area.
Anyone else want to ante up and compare? I think my salary is "average", but I've really kind of wanted to know for certain.