2006 Game Developer Salary Survey Now Available

Gamasutra's annual game developer salary survey will be coming to subscribers of the magazine in the next issue. As always, it looks at the current trends in payment for folks in the games industry, and some of that info is now available online. "According to the new survey, conducted in association with Audience Insights, the average salary in 2006 over all American game programmers was $80,886 - basically flat on the year before, thanks to an influx of entry level coders to the game business, but with significant increases for veteran programmers. The 2006 average for artists was $65,107, again basically flat on 2005, though average salaries of experienced lead artists and animators rose the most. The game designers' average was $61,538, with salaries scaling within a $5,000 range over the last 3 years over all experience levels." The new survey also marks the kickoff of Game Developer Research, a division aimed at doing quantitative analysis of games and gaming trends.

Comments

Unfortunately...

[Anonymous Coward]

That only translates into 9.50 an hour.

(8.00 an hour at EA)

Any Gamasutra subscribers here?

[mobby_6kl]

I'm not a game dev and not planning on becoming one in the near future, but it would be interesting to see some more statistical data on this. As we (should) all know, the simple average is not very useful is cases like this, it'd be nice to at least see the median and standard deviation values. Or a histogram for each of the major categories.

Median and std dev useless

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Mediann and std dev are useless. They only really apply for normal distributions. Salaries tend not to have a normal distribution so they lose their value.

Re:Median and std dev useless

[illegalcortex]

Possibly true, but I would argue that averages are much MORE useless. At least with medians you'd get a chance of filtering out the high paid outliers. I think a histogram for many different areas of the country/world would be the main thing you'd need to actually make any sense out of this.

Never mind that!

[Threni]

I want to know what Atari 2600 developers are up to! I bet they're living like gods!

Re:Salaried or Hourly?

[bmac83]

My guess is that people in the game design industry are there because they love it, not necessarily for excess compensation as compared to salaries paid in other fields within the industry. So, excess hours over the standard workweek are probably acceptable to many people.

Re:Priority?

[xero314]

I was very much under the impression that game designers were kind of like project managers for games If designers are like project manager (not exactly they way I figured it would be) then the game industry would be the first one to get the pay scale correct.

After all it should always go People Who Mostly Work > People Who Mostly Play > People Who Do Nothing.

Re:Priority?

[GaratNW]

The concept of "game designer" is very obfuscated from an outside perspective. Inside the industry, it can go from "lead designer/creative director", who are very much like project managers, to "Level designer", "ai scripter", "world builder", including tasks like placing hundreds or thousands of creatures, placing furniture, writing quests, simple and complex in whatever tools are available. Again, it covers a huge experience level, and skill set composition. Hence why the salary is shown so low. For every one creative director making $100k or $150k, you have 10 to 20 level designers, script writers, etc making $30k to $50k.

But, speaking as a project manager in the games industry, in response to someone's snarky comment below. A project manager in the games industry that doesn't do anything... doesn't last very long, in my experience. There's not nearly enough money flowing freely through most companies to put up with dead weight. Well, not at most companies anyway. Dead weight, period, usually doesn't last. Or maybe I've just been lucky. :)

Cheers.