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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.
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.
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
It also does not mention where these jobs were physically located. 70-80k in say, Austin, goes a whole lot farther than it does in San Jose or Boston.
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
I moved to the other coast, make about half what she does, and I'm buying a house this summer. She may be making more money, but that doesn't mean she has more money.
2003
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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!