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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

448 points by elsewhen 5y ago

f430 5y ago
What is it about game development field that makes it so labor intensive with consistent overtimes? I tried to make a simple FPS game and it was astounding how much work was involved. Took 6 month of learning Unreal and Unity and gave up with a functioning prototype. Took 4 months of back and forth with Steam to list my game. Even harder trying to make money off it. I'm just in awe of Roblox, Minecraft, Fall Guy and all these other successes. We all love games but not everybody gets to make em. It's insane how much detail and granted we take for all the flood of games we have out now. It did make me change my stance on piracy. Somebody spent their sweat and blood bringing that game. We should pay for it what we can but won't be against emulation of retro ROMs.
- adammunich 5y ago
  Attention is competitive and you always have to churn out new stuff when running a game company.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Making a game is a deeply interdisciplinary exercise. Sound, visual art, storytelling, game theory, acting (voice or full body acting if motion capture) and of course many fields of technology, ai, graphics, core performance tuning, esoteric OS and hardware knowledge...and much more. We're also exposed to AAA works that easily took 500 highly skilled artisans several years to build. Expectations are sky high.
  - junon 5y ago
    And even if you're not doing those things directly, you absolutely need to know how they all tie together and how they work at some level of proficiency in order to make a cohesive game.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I would add: there is also no "happy path" for gamers. Users will do everything they can within the game and you will spend a great deal of time handling those "edge cases" in code.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I'm amazed any independent games get made considering all the skills needed, but that scene seems very rich in content... I always wonder how that is considering the breadth of knowledge required.
- amelius 5y ago
  > It did make me change my stance on piracy. Somebody spent their sweat and blood bringing that game. We should pay for it what we can but won't be against emulation of retro ROMs. I don't know about games, but in movies I don't care about the detail that CGI offers. Just give me a good story.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  I know it sounds trite, but it really is supply and demand. So so so many developers want to build games. The market for developers making things that _aren't_ games is red-hot. But because they REALLY want to develop games, game companies can use them to their limit for low pay.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    The game industry has the unique advantage that entry level developers spend their preceding 10-15 years playing games and building up a desire to make them. Imagine if kids had Enterprise Software consoles and played with Jira tickets on them. The rest of the industry would be swimming in applicants :-)
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  Modern AAA games involve an absolute ton of work, but the reason for the consistent overtime is that abusive labor practices have become institutionalized within the industry in the US. The EA lawsuit is a famous example, but truly is just the tip of the iceberg. Most gamedevs become personally invested in what they're doing enough that the studios/publishers know they can underpay and overwork their staff. I was briefly in the industry at the end of the 90s, and still talk with people in the biz today occasionally. From what they tell me things just keep getting worse on this point.
  - rhexs 5y ago
    The easy fix to this is to not exempt “IT Professionals” from overtime in a bullshit rider on a completely unrelated law. Pay overtime, make it expensive to drive employees over 40 hours, and the problem disappears overnight.
    - SeanBoocock 5y ago
      That’s exactly what EA did in response to the “EA Spouse” episode. New grad employees are hired as hourly, non-exempt workers and paid overtime for their first couple years. The financial incentive alone doesn’t eliminate crunch, but it is one of many factors that has improved the culture at EA over the last 15 years.
- emtel 5y ago
  > What is it about game development field that makes it so labor intensive with consistent overtimes? I helped lead a team that built and shipped a 3D multiplayer game from scratch with a custom engine. I went into it expecting it to be harder than I thought it would be, and it was harder still. I think the thing that makes game dev fundamentally harder than other types of software is that most software products solve a problem or take away pain. So they only have to be good enough that the user is better off using the product than not using it. And there are still many problems out there that people face for which there is no solution. So even an imperfect solution might be quite good. Games on the other hand have to be so good that playing them is more fun/appealing/rewarding than the next best thing the player might do with those hours. While the technical challenges in some types of games are daunting, I suspect that even technically simpler games like 2d platformers are probably much harder to develop now than they were a few decades ago, due to necessity of competing against every other activity the player has to choose from.
  - matt_s 5y ago
    I think this hits the nail on the head. There is a low barrier to solving someone's pain in creating a typical CRUD app. Its easy to pick an industry, find an application that could use some newer features and create something. Copying feature parity involves little creative work. There is no ceiling on making a game fun to play. Creative, fun ways to do crafting, leveling, fighting, puzzles, etc. can engage players to come back and replay content infinitely if that is the goal.
  - JabavuAdams 5y ago
    This is a good observation. You can have a feature list for a game and complete every one (hah, who am I kidding!), but if the end product isn't fun, so what? It's not going to be successful, and all your effort is wasted. There's the in-principle estimatable work to implement all of the game systems and then there's all the other unpredictable work to actually make the damn thing fun. Feature-creep is endemic because creative directors/stake-holders can just move the goalposts or insist on their pet features / vision.
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
- mbesto 5y ago
  > with consistent overtimes? One thing I've noticed about businesses that operate in the arts & entertainment space - people who do a lot of the labor have personal passions for their industry and are subsequently are willing to deal with employer abuses.
- munk-a 5y ago
  OT in the gaming field is insidious and mostly comes from the fact that the majority of your employees are salaried and working in fields where OT pay is not required. Overtime is an inefficient use of employee stress when compared to working regular hours - you'll burn people out and cause health issues in your workforce (a friend of mine had tension headaches when they worked too much OT - I turned to sugary drinks to keep myself going and put on weight). However, if the cost of those extra hours to the company is nothing then just see how quickly shops like EA are willing to force you into 20 hour days while you see nothing extra in your take home. Overtime laws need real overhauls and nobody should be able to bargain away standard working hours or it hurts all of us.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  1. it's a multidisplinary effort that involves interfacing not just with engineers, managers, and maybe clients, but with artist, writers, sound designers, and sometimes voice actors. Very, very few people will have the full scope of a large game in their mind makling a game. It also means one of these pieces can vastly slow down the entire pipeline if they get slowed down/behind schedule. 2. many traditional games operate on movie schedules; i.e. timing is everything. missing a launch at November vs. January can cost millions, and most sales are recuped in the first few months. So the pressure to hit deadlines is heavier than some continual service brining in a steady revenue stream. Granted, the rise of Games as a Service through the free-to-play model is starting to change this, for better or worse. 3. even within programming, there are so many topics that games delve into. Graphics programming, netcode, UI/UX design, (basic) AI, etc. you need some very specialized people to make these games, up there with a FAANG despite most studios making nowhere near that much. 4. you can't schedule "fun". Game design is almost a black box. If you flesh out this system and it just doesn't feel good, what do you do? delay the game and overspend on the budget? release it anyway and take the critical panning (spoilers, most games do this option)? this mixed with #1 means it's harder than usual to schedule, even with the widsom of "double the time needed". 5. more of a personal take here, but based on #4: games are much more "in tune" with the consumer audience than other media. core gamers watch games like hawks and it seems like everything being worked on is covered in NDA's. some onlooker would think these studios are hiding governemt secrets with how tight lipped industry keeps devs. This leads to many psychological factors, but as a TL;DR it means a) devs may have internal pressure to impress the audience compared to other sectors and b) consumers, being blacked boxed out of the process, underestimate how much work it is to make a game. A consumer base more internet saavy than any other medium before it, since gaming basically grew up with the internet side by side. It's many factors and I'm sure I haven't even covered half of them in that wall above. >I'm just in awe of Roblox, Minecraft, Fall Guy and all these other successes. I'm sure minecraft and roblox are impressed too. they took years to get to where they are, so they are some of the counterexamples to the traditional model I listed. Fall guys truly proves point #2. it came out at the perfect time (a time no one could predict far out enough to take advantadge of) and blew up for it.
0xy 5y ago
It's really weird how this article starts by showing how through negotiation and job searching you can increase your salary, but bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to depress wages for top performers (just look at teachers unions, where pay is totally disconnected from competence and performance). If you're a really good game developer, artist or animator then you should learn the skill of negotiation and asking for what you want. Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life. So is knowing when to leave companies. I truly do not understand why anyone stays at these game studios for 5+ years and allows themselves to be absolutely robbed blind by pitiful wages and cost-of-living raises.
- lend000 5y ago
  You're probably being downvoted because you mentioned unions in a negative light, but your points are factually correct. Unions have a place for protecting unskilled workers, but what happens in game development is quite unique, because these workers are in-demand software engineers who typically have better options working in a less glorified field.
  - sldksk 5y ago
    Most unions in the US are in fact only made up of skilled workers. Your point is just wrong.
    - minimuffins 5y ago
      I think you'll have a hard time sourcing that claim.
      - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/073015/top-5-most-unionized-industries.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/07301... The top 5 appear to be teachers, steelworkers, public service workers, autoworkers, and electrical workers. How many of these would you describe as "unskilled"?
bluescrn 5y ago
The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger :(
- darknavi 5y ago
  Which direction? The article doesn't give me a good sense for how European devs are getting paid.
  - bluescrn 5y ago
    Vastly higher in the US (at least 2x, maybe 3x), judging from the #gamedevpaidme hashtag. Yeah, there's cost-of-living factors involved, but gamedev in the UK (and Europe?) just pays poorly. There's certainly money being made, but it's usually buying fancy cars for studio directors, not going into rewarding the dev team.
- Nursie 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s just games! UK software dev money is terrible, outside of contracting.
  - ngngngng 5y ago
    Why in the world is software money so terrible in the UK? I always look up salaries and cost of living when traveling and the UK was one of the more surprising instances of that. It seems like the only way to live comfortably in London is in finance.
    - ck425 5y ago
      Software salaries aren't terrible in the UK, they're just not as crazy as the US. Most decent software engineers I know are comfortable in the 80th percentile of income or higher.
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        I don't think software is terrible anywhere in the world, compared to local pay level. In many parts it's not at top, but it always decent. USA is just outlier. In other places it is comparable or slightly above other engineering disciplines...
q_andrew 5y ago
Unfortunately this probably won't be changing any time soon. Similar to the movie industry in CA, execs see game developers as totally replaceable, because they kind of are. There are so many people who are extremely passionate about making games, that they will jump after any opportunity, even when they know it isn't paying what it should. The only thing that might bring about some kind of reform is a union or a change in US/CA/UK labor laws.
- Bukhmanizer 5y ago
  One thing that I haven’t really seen mentioned is that the barrier for entry is high in a lot of video game development. Meaning, I can’t really take 3 of my friends and make the next GTA in my garage. Those type of games need developers, but also artists, writers, actors, etc. They’re expensive, risky operations of which development is only a part of. This is probably why it makes the most sense to treat developers as a commodity in the industry. The level at which the consumer interacts with the developer isn’t as high as say, a website.
  - bilbo0s 5y ago
    Underrated comment. It's even worse when you consider that the engines are generally already made, you only need developers to do what you could almost call glorified scripting compared to engine development. I think Unity and Unreal probably have to pay their devs a reasonable salary. But having devs work in Unity or Unreal to produce a game is not really all that hard. That's kind of the point of Unity and Unreal.
    - luaKmua 5y ago
      Having done work in a variety of contexts from Game Engine development to working in Unity, what you are describing is only true for the most trivial of projects. Larger projects (especially AAA) have so much customization of the engines and pushing of their boundaries that they require just as much technical expertise as engine development for many of the required tasks. There are advantages and disadvantages for using these engines. They soften the "getting started" part of game dev for newer people, but for complicated projects it tends to be kicking the can down the road for dealing with deeper issues. You'd be hard pressed to squeeze good perf out Unity while fully using the HDRP and not understanding the ins and outs of the pipeline.
SamuelAdams 5y ago
This isn't unique to game dev. This is true in education as well - most white collar positions pay between 40 - 100k while vice presidents and presidents get 250k + packages. I think more developers need to get better at negotiating. One 10 minute conversation can beat years of 2-4% raises. It's all about setting expectations and being willing to walk away.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  Walking away is only powerful if you have leverage. Game devs, unlike a lot of other software, are not super in demand. You can't apply for an entry level job at EA and then pop over to Ubisoft instead when the offer from EA is crap. There are way more folks trying to break into game dev than there are jobs available.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    I actually work for a AAA games company and what you said only applies at kind of junior/intermediate level. Hit senior/lead/expert and you can walk out and get another job in a week, it's super hard to hire seniors and above and those positions hold a lot of leverage. Edit: obligatory "above is true in my experience, YMMV"
    - dijit 5y ago
      I work(ed) for the same company as gambiting and can confirm this to be true. Hit Senior (easy to do after 5y) and game companies throw money at you to come over because getting people in who have a shipping mentality is hard- most people who want to be gamedevs see the glamour, those that ship see the pain a mile away and how to avoid it. The issue might be that most who become senior do not really move because the tool chains are largely different between companies. Frostbite and Snowdrop are incredibly different game engines and even those working on Unreal/Unity at the AAA level invariably maintain a fork due to limitations in the engine itself which makes it not compelling to sacrifice all your knowledge. Also, I find that most companies end up turning their C++ into a custom C++-like language with fancy types like growable hash tables and vectors. Many of which have quirks which require experience otherwise there can be footguns. (Some functions may be more correct but quadratic and others are fast but less precise and knowing when to use what is part of being a senior in some companies)
WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
Spoiler: Without reading it, it's shit. People go into it thinking they're in love with video games and get chewed out of the machine after a few years.
- pasquinelli 5y ago
  what i learned as a gamedev: the saying, "do what you love for a living and you never work a day in your life", is false. it's actually, "do what you love for a living and what you love becomes a job." what you need is a job you don't mind doing, which is the scam of higher education, because you plunk down all that money or debt or both, and years of time, and you get no guarantee that there'll be any job for you, but worse, you have no idea if you want to do that job. meanwhile, corporations have plenty of people to pick from who need to get a job in their field, either for financial reasons or psychological ones, who trained themselves at their own expense. the idea that such a large block of people are cornered into acting against their own interests and in the interests of such a small block of people almost makes one question the idea of liberal democracy.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    The one thing that has pissed me off the most about job markets is that companies have outsourced the training on you... the most common remark when interviewing is "we want someone be able to hit the ground right away" I remember hearing about companies actually training their people.
    - stevezsa8 5y ago
      So true. Each time I was hired, I was expected to learn on my own time. The best I could get was a $30 book paid for. I kinda assumed the company was responsible to train you. The only training I received was when I volunteered to be first aid for the office. But I assume it was only due to it being a legal requirement to have some trained people.
- xtracto 5y ago
  I second this sentiment. I did my BSc Soft. Eng. between 1999 and 2004. At the time I wanted so bad to get into game development. Being myself from a third world country there was no clear path to that. More or less at the same time, the infamous "EA Spouses" scandal broke, and after giving a good look at the industry I decided against it. 17 years later, I don't regret my decision at all. I'm at the top of my career, earning a USD salary, (around $150k USD) living in my third world country with great benefits and developing exciting things (fintech, crypto, etc). I still sometimes doodle around with Unity some weekends, for entertainment purposes
node-bayarea 5y ago
If my software is online and the company can make profit from across the world, why should I get paid locally?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  There is no 'should' either way in a salary negotiation though - just what can you two agree on.
- bidirectional 5y ago
  Surely this line of thinking leads to lower salaries? Silicon Valley salaries are purely a function of the local labour market, Facebook still pays Oxford graduates in (insanely expensive) London a fraction of what they would be earning in the US.
  - filleduchaos 5y ago
    > Surely this line of thinking leads to lower salaries? Only if one falls for the canard that employers anywhere - yes, in Silicon Valley as well - are actually paying their employees their full worth. If they were doing that, they wouldn't be making any money. Most of the companies that are large enough to be hiring internationally are already paying even their top-earning non-executive staff a tiny fraction of what they bring to the table. Any company that's trying to undercut that even more in the name of "location awareness" isn't a company I want to work at.
duxup 5y ago
What is the supply of labor like like when it comes to game development? It seems like there might be a huge number of folks who want to get into the game industry, but not as many jobs available? Could that have an impact on salaries? When I changed careers and attended a coding camp, there were a handful of very capable folks who had failed to get into the gaming industry noting how many other folks like them there were trying to break in. They had much less trouble getting into other (not gaming) areas after they retooled a bit.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Wanting to be a game developer and being a good game developer are pretty different things. I'm sure that first shipped game to appear on your resume greatly increases the frequency and salary of offers. Also game development requires a lot of disparate skill sets. Artists are pretty much always underpaid relative to the amount of time and effort they put into their craft. The money there is always going to be as a lead/manager.
  - Taylor_OD 5y ago
    Wanting to be a software developer and being a good software developer are pretty different things. However most good software developers make more money than good game developers.
Finage 5y ago
I believe cryptocurrency based gaming would be new level for game developers like Alice.
ashtonkem 5y ago
My standard advice to every graduate CS student is to stay the hell away from professional video game development. If you want to make games, turn it into a hobby instead.
- ttul 5y ago
  I dunno. My friend is making $250K working for Roblox. He’s 15yrs into his career - all game dev. Doesn’t seem too bad.
  - dbish 5y ago
    15 years in software could get you a lot more outside game dev
    - Thaxll 5y ago
      Most dev in the US don't make 250k after 15years.
      - xvector 5y ago
        Most devs in the US don’t care about maximizing their career.
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        Pay isn’t even the main reason I’d avoid gaming, it’s the tendency of game companies to grossly abuse their workers via crunch time and sudden studio closures that worries me. The same dynamics that suppress game dev salaries also lead companies to treating their workers as replaceable, which is a pretty bad situation to end up in.
      - dbish 5y ago
        Yes, but I think of Roblox like a FAANG in terms of success and money. If you moved to a FAANG with that experience you would likely make a good chunk more
Ekaros 5y ago
Supply and demand. If there is more people accepting lower rates then rates will be lower. Nothing wrong with that. It's not like many of the skills aren't at least some level of transferable. So if money is an issue try to find employment outside gaming sector. Like everyone else does when balancing income and job.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
My early salary history as a midwest gamedev: 17yo: unpaid intern, 1 year (2005) 18yo: $20k/yr (2006) 19yo: $35/yr (2007) 22yo: $70k/yr (2010) I don't regret it; I learned most of my skills during those formative years. But I was also "part of the problem" in the sense that I was happy as a clam being paid $20k/yr living at my parents' house, putting every dollar into the bank. Saved up $15k and felt like I was rich; it was great. I'm not sure there's anything to learn from my experience, since I was an outlier, but there y'go. I was also so completely dedicated to the idea of becoming a gamedev that I'm not sure anyone could have talked me out of it.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  This is pretty insightful. My (non-dev) career path followed a similar path (due to skipping college). Are you still in the gaming industry?
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Nah, that last datapoint was also my last job as a gamedev. I went into finance (avoid, unless it's at a fund), security (avoid; you no longer build things), then ML (total immersion; happiest I've ever been).
- munk-a 5y ago
  To contrast - I only got into the gaming field briefly in Canada and after working at a med device company that paid me more as a junior dev than I ever got as a database and server specialist in gaming - 24yo:50k CA 26yo: 53k CA And at 28 I shifted to an insurance related software company and immediately got bumped to 80k which still wasn't that amazing. There was also a whole bunch of unpaid overtime while working in gaming.
- ngold 5y ago
  Good for you. You are not part of the problem, you figured out how to get a 4 year degree and they paid you for it. The problem how I see it is the lack of recurring revenue from your work. Sure pay shit, bUT if the game makes a billion dollars, you get a check every month. Employee owned businesses are the only hope I see for the future.
paulpauper 5y ago
being a game dev. seems like the worst tech job: few perks, minimal promotion opportunity, no ipo riches, no buyout riches, no lucrative stock options, high failure rate, low pay relative to revenues and exec pay, long hours, no credit, low salary cap, etc.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  It's all about the environment. The pay was shit, but having the devs on another project letting you play their in-progress work and give real feedback at lunch or playing board games with the design team whose job is to literally go out to Walmart, buy board games, and come back and analyze them, then go home and play WoW in your company guild, its just not an experience you can get anywhere else. It may be an unpopular opinion, but game devs are paid correctly since game companies offer an experience and culture that is totally their own. It's too bad one eventually needs to move on to a inferior environment in search of more income and free time.
  - stevezsa8 5y ago
    I've worked in many software companies. We had lunch time/after hours boardgames at every single one. OK, I was the one organising it, but still. Plus we got paid well. Win/win :]
    - JabavuAdams 5y ago
      Yeah, but the work is pretty boring to the kinds of personalities who like to work on games, even if it's often more important.
    - blacktriangle 5y ago
      That sounds like a nice environment, but it just doesn't hold a candle to working in a place where everybody from the office staff to the devs to the artists to the managers just lives and breaths gaming. Let me put this another way: there's a gaming group like you have where you have to drag everybody to the table occasionally at lunch time for some casual games, and then there's gaming groups where 6 of you show up to play Twilight Imperium every weekend and every person memorized the rules on their own time. Working at a game company is the later.
yummybear 5y ago
I’m not from the US, but is 150k considered a bad salary?
- twodave 5y ago
  It's heavily dependent on the region one lives in. In Jacksonville, FL, for instance, $150k+ is mostly reserved for SVP/C-level folks.
- bb611 5y ago
  It's about 50% above average for the country, but HN tends to have a very coastal crowd, in particular a lot of SV talent where average pay is much higher. Experienced people easily break $200k, at my (non-FAANG) company the entry level package for Bay Area devs is more than $150k.
twodave 5y ago
The skill required to perform a job isn't the only consideration when determining its cost. I grew up with the dream of working for Blizzard or the like. The truth is, gaming is a major gateway into the programming world. Kids grow up playing these games and dream about what it would be like to be able to create something so spectacular. Many of us who went through with learning to build software took a different path, either due to location restraints or economics or just lack of ability. These wage discrepancies are not caused by companies paying crap wages. It's caused by game developers who are willing to accept living in a high-cost area alongside earning crap wages. If you're in game development and want to be paid more, step out of game development and optionally move to a more affordable area. If you're competent you'll end up with a pay raise and better working/life balance. If you're hell-bent on working your dream job in a high-cost location, you should be cognizant that it's lots of other people's dream job, too (many of whom have put it aside, but would return in a heartbeat if the compensation were comparable). You've chosen to put money in the back seat. TL;DR - until more people start making the economical choice, game development salaries will continue to be low.
socialist_coder 5y ago
Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years career: If your argument is "You can make more at a FAANG company" - well yeah, you can. You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games and you enjoy having all your coworkers also love games and being able to talk to all of them about games and having your company culture revolve around games and gaming. It's games all the way down! It's a completely different work environment. As someone who loves games, the best years of my working career were when I was working on game teams, not at tech companies. Also, developer salaries in games is still plenty good. It's still great money. I never felt like I was losing out. Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime. As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it. Maybe some game companies treat their employees like dirt and work them into the ground, but the ones I've worked for, I never felt that way. Don't work at those terrible companies! There are plenty of "good" game companies out there who pay good salaries and have good working conditions. As someone who is older now with kids, my priorities are definitely different than when I worked in games during my 20s and early 30s. I would no longer be happy working those 60 hour weeks. I want a better work life balance. So I don't know if I could work on a game team like that anymore. But do I regret working there before I had a family? Absolutely not. #gamedev4life
- Impossible 5y ago
  It's also possible to work on games or game like software at FAANG, not crunch (although FAANG companies have plenty of other toxic qualities that can make them worse than a game job in subtle ways) and get paid a FAANG salary.
swyx 5y ago
because this post and the linked bloomberg post was frustratingly light on detail: - the blizzard spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpUOMpyarcMsNzid-nA1OqbXkA/htmlview?pru=AAABc9xm048*IoWzMOeJOOiSRFAKtwbe_g https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpU... - visualizations: https://imgur.com/a/OBG7Fch https://imgur.com/a/OBG7Fch
stewx 5y ago
I looked at the salaries people are posting, and what I am seeing is people (at least the ones comfortable with posting this kind of info on the Internet) rapidly climbing from $30-50k/yr USD to $75-150k/yr USD. These are excellent wages. They may be lower than outside the video game industry, but by any other standard they are phenomenally good wages, in the top 1% globally and at least the top 10-20% in developed countries. In terms of income, these people are unambiguously part of the upper class.
- ctvo 5y ago
  It isn't about how the salary compares globally. It's about how does this compare to their peers. The asymmetrical nature of information available to employees vs. information available to the company generally leads to employees undervaluing themselves. By sharing what others in the company or in the region make for the same job, we help people ask for more.
  - Pfhreak 5y ago
    And furthermore, it's how it compares to the profits of the company. If an engineer is returning $500,000k annually in profit to a company from their work, and getting paid $75k of that, they are being exploited. (Or at the very least are undervaluing their labor.)
    - bogwog 5y ago
      That's an unnatural/weird way to look at it. If the engineer provides $500k value per year, and they get paid $500k per year, the company makes $0 profit. By that logic, the only way to not be underpaid is for the company to be in the red; but if that happens, there won't be a company to pay you! Plus, it's likely any other engineer could provide the same value. So (as always) it's about supply and demand. In this case, there are a lot of qualified engineers that want to work in games, and relatively few positions. Unions could affect that, but I think it'd do more harm than good at the high end (it would definitely help lower paid positions like QA though). Maybe if Epic wins their case against Apple, it'll unleash a tidal wave of anti-trust lawsuits against the likes of Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, etc. and the game industry will explode with new business opportunities, new investments, and new jobs to balance out the supply/demand curve for game developers at all levels! (...or not)
hintymad 5y ago
Game development is arguably technically harder than typical CRUD-type of app development, even if one uses a game engine. I was wondering if it's simply a matter of supply and demand. So many great programmers want to work on games, hence driving down the salary in the industry.
julienb_sea 5y ago
This is ultimately a supply and demand issue. Google pays high salaries because they have to in order to hire the talent they want. Game devs apparently do not have to, because they are able to fill their roles for lower salaries. Don't pretend like all tech companies wouldn't love to lower dev salaries, they just can't because they wouldn't be able to hire. Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator, which is that working in a gaming context is something people actually value and are willing to give up potential compensation for. This seems especially true at the junior level, which depresses junior salaries relative to other tech companies. Also, comparing compensation against US FAANG hiring is beyond insane. They pay ridiculous salaries due to the extremely limited and competitive market for hires that meet their caliber. This has driven up salaries, but should NOT be treated as an indicator for what "reasonable" pay looks like across the entire industry.
- StreamBright 5y ago
  And the locations FAANGs are operate also tend to be the most expensive parts of US.
  - xtqctz 5y ago
    This is fact which feels related, but doesn't have much to do with labor market wage equilibrium.
    - Retric 5y ago
      High cost of living areas push people away when the local job market slumps. So, the equilibrium does end up relating to high housing costs just indirectly. Aka, if they paid less the local population drops which would reduce supply.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jaaron 5y ago
  It's not just that. Google (and a few others) dealt with retention issues from startups and other companies in SV who's sole recruiting strategy was poach from Google, ie- use Google as a filter and let them do all the work finding great talent and then we'll just hire Googlers (or one of the other major SV tech companies). So retention is a significant factor for Google and other FAANG companies. They can simply pay enough to make sure other companies can't come in and take their talent.
stunt 5y ago
I don't remember now but I thought many contracts require employees to keep it confidential! Or not?
- paxys 5y ago
  That is illegal in the USA.
sadpolishdev 5y ago
Makes me sad as a polish game-developer, who decided never to work in my country again. I have 15+ years of experience, I've made games for ps2 and original xbox aside PCs, and until i've left the "national" gamedev industry, my salaries were (monthly) along these numbers: around 2005ish: 3d artist / junior - 600usd 3d artist / mid - 800usd around 2009ish: 3d artist / team lead: 1100usd 3d artist / senior / team lead 1200usd around 2012ish: 3d artist / senior / team lead / delegated to maintain and oversee a remote office in other side of the country - 1200usd + rent paid (around 300usd) 2014 decided to leave any employment, and started own company that freelance/outsource work - salary quadrupled (after taxes). Since then, I had a steady rose in hourly rates, so its not comparable to normal local gamedev salaries at any point. Its ok to love games and want to make games. Just dont be exploitable idiot, and working on AAA title that sells millions for 1000usd/month, while beign called mid, or lead for 2.5k usd/month for having responsibility of evaluating several other teammates work.
danielrpa 5y ago
I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game job was much, MUCH better than FAANG. No matter how many fancy drinks and energy bars FAANG gives me, if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get employees, otherwise many people would simply work elsewhere. There is a myth that working at FAANG is amazing for everybody, but most people I know there are actually kind of miserable and doing fairly dull work for which they are massively overqualified. Nonetheless, these companies have money and they want the "best" (in their eyes) people for everything, so they pay for it... Well, it's a decent deal.
- thewarrior 5y ago
  There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ? I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so many people in detail. It’s a juicy target for recruiter raiding. And just like you can’t get fired for hiring IBM you can’t get fired for hiring FANG. This attracts yet more talent. But yes the level of the engineers is not as great as the salaries would suggest. But on the flip side for anyone doing hiring. If you want some wicked smart devs who don’t ask for as much then look at game devs.
  - Sevii 5y ago
    FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out. Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.
  - kenhwang 5y ago
    FAANG doesn't need "the best", but they do need to deny upstart competition that talent.
flakiness 5y ago
In Japan, the game and anime industries are called "aspiration industry" because of the reasons discussed here. There is also a term "aspiration abuse". That is because it's not only about the market dynamics (supply vs demand) but also a information asymmetry involved. It is considered more like a problem of immigration brokers: They sell dreams, but many of them are fake.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  in all fairness, if the stories on Japan are true there isn't such thing as a healthy work/life balance period. At that point, if I'm gonna spend half my life (and 90% of my waking life) at work, I may as well try and like doing what I do.
a_t48 5y ago
I left the gaming industry for robotics. I'm lucky in a number of ways (no college degree, no robotics background), but the salary and WLB is so much better here. My last job was FAANG level salary/bonuses, my current company is a bit smaller but maybe we'll get there at some point. Don't get me wrong - I _miss_ it. So much. I know it's Stockholm Syndrome, but the people in the industry are my people and I miss shipping games. The work is very interesting (not that my current job isn't). But my life outside of work has improved so much after leaving - I likely won't ever go back. I remember being told "why would you want to do that?" when I told a gamedev friend I wanted to join the industry. I didn't get what he meant then, but now I do. If some young programmer wanted to get in now...well - I wouldn't dissuade them - it's a great way to get a lot of experience and work on cool stuff - but go in eyes wide open. Maybe have an exit plan. Off the top of my head I know a dozen excellent developers I worked with in the past who have left games for greener pastures (most of them robotics - the 3D math experience and ability to work with large codebases carry over well).
gameswithgo 5y ago
I an 42 on the usa and three years ago when job hunting got five offers. non game offers were in the 140-150 range, some with equity on top, gamedev was 110 (EA) I might have taken it but for the looong commute. glad i didnt though!
ineptech 5y ago
I don't know why this is limited to game developers. I'm a mgr/dir and it seems obvious to me that secrecy around salaries is consciously perpetuated because it allows corporations to get away with underpaying some people. I can't think of any circumstance where it wouldn't be in the individual contributors' best interests to tell each other exactly what they all make. If everyone on my teams shared their salaries with each other, it would lead to two things: a) some short-term bad blood and awkwardness, and b) some underpaid people getting raises or quitting. And I think my bosses, especially the old-school ones, consciously play up a) and treat salary as a giant taboo to avoid b).
- werber 5y ago
  I've always been very open with coworkers about salaries. And in my experience the underpaid people were always not like me ( white and male ) and frequently better at their jobs than me.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Because that's who decided to start doing this to try and create more openness in their particular industry. Talk to a few people in your industry, see who you can get to share their salaries, try and get the ball rolling on #MyIndustryPaidMe.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  Levels.fyi exists. There are internal spreadsheets at various tech companies that share their comp. Agreed though, I'd love to see this elsewhere in tech.
- throw123123123 5y ago
  It's a tragedy of the commons situation. You can share yours and nobody shares theirs, so you lose a bit. You need a large number to make it work effectively. I personally never feared sharing my salary, but even after that not a single person ever in multiple jobs shared their salary with me.
- goatinaboat 5y ago
  I can't think of any circumstance where it wouldn't be in the individual contributors' best interests to tell each other exactly what they all make. If everyone on my teams shared their salaries with each other, it would lead to two things: a) some short-term bad blood and awkwardness, and b) some underpaid people getting raises or quitting. And I think my bosses, especially the old-school ones, consciously play up a) and treat salary as a giant taboo to avoid b). A previous employer explicitly stated in their contract that disclosing your salary was a disciplinary offence!
throwkeep 5y ago
> Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe These are to be taken with a pound of salt. Location, experience, performance, timing, negotiation skills, stock options, etc, make these simplistic salary comparisons highly misleading. > to encourage pay transparency in their industry. That's the hook, but these Twitter hashtag campaigns are thinly veiled brag fests. The game devs who push these live in high COL areas, tend to be veterans and want to show the world their 6 figure salary. Which looks incredible to most of their followers. Every time they get these hashtags trending, the "you make that much? you rock!" responses flow in.
Vaslo 5y ago
Are there just too many games? I basically rotate my time between a space mmo called Dual Universe and Red Dead Redemption 2 on the ps5. That’s it - I pay a monthly fee for DU and paid 60 bucks a few years ago for RDR2. That’s it. That’s all the gaming I really need for months. Go to the web or steam up and see a plethora of games and realize how little share of wallet most of these games get. Unfortunately it’s not enough to pay some designers any decent salary. Sad to say but it may be a problem that works itself out through survival of the fittest. Only the best games will get the most bucks and the rest will languish. But if there isn’t enough time for them, should they really exist in the first place?
Jagerbizzle 5y ago
I've worked in the Games industry since 1997. I got my first year-long job fresh out of high school in QA at EA in Canada, worked summers over the following years while getting my degrees, transitioned to a programming role after university, and ultimately moved to the US in 2013 for work in games at one of the big tech companies. 1997-2003 - QA @ EA, ~$9-12 an hour (CAD), 1.5x for hours 40-48, 2x > 48 hours. We worked a lot of 90 hour weeks, and I had no life outside of work, so I had a lot of spare cash. 2003-2008 - Game Dev in Eastern Canada. Started at 40k a year, ended at 62k a year (CAD). 2008-2013 - Game Dev in Western Canada, started at 80k a year, ended at 100k per year (CAD). Got promoted to "senior" in 2010 and managed a team of 6 programmers during my last year and a half prior to leaving. 2013-present - Moved to the United States at a big tech company that does games. Took a role-demotion to be a non-senior IC for a wage-promotion of 135k a year USD. Presently have a similar role to the one I left in Canada (albeit a much larger team) and make >350k USD a year.
lsiebert 5y ago
It's interesting the compare dev salaries, but are folks aware of how high executive compensation at gaming companies, much less FANG companies, is?
bennysomething 5y ago
Am I supposed to feel sorry for games developers? Like they are some exploited sweat shop workers? One example in there a person was earning 150k+. They started off low and due to experience increased their salary. We keep getting told how awful the games industry is. I'm doubtful, why would so many people continue to work in it? At the very least any of the programmers could move to other sectors. I'm guessing the answer is the type of work. It's highly creative unlike business programming.
thecleaner 5y ago
Devs in Europe be like - are these supposed to be low salaries ?
diveanon 5y ago
After leaving the vfx industry for web dev I doubled my salary. I guess the moral is that game / vfx studios need to start chasing dumb VC cash.
wanttobethatkid 5y ago
When making games are hard and make huge profit why are the salaries low? I doubt the argument that there are vast number of game developers who are passionate and are willing to take low salary. The reason is if that is the case why don't they make their own games? My hypothesis is to make game only few people in the team need high skill and the majority need low skill hence the compensation is low as the entry is easy and supply is high.
throwaway_eu123 5y ago
Anyone feeling like sharing insights about what it's like in the EU? It will probably highly depend on the country/region (wild guessing that salaries in eastern EU are lower) but these salaries are beyond my wildest dreams. I live in Belgium, work for an international company, I have a master's degree in computer science, speak three languages fluently (French, English, Spanish) and have been working for 10 years as a software engineer, I currently get paid 2500 EUR net per month (+ a company car, fuel card and some other minor benefits [lunch ticket and such]). Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2500,0 EUR (net, started at 1750 EUR) × 1,7 (various taxes) x 13 (everybody has a "13th month" in this field) -------- 55250 EUR (gross) Yes, anything related to health is cheaper here but even if you factor that in...

448 points by elsewhen 5y ago

f430 5y ago

What is it about game development field that makes it so labor intensive with consistent overtimes? I tried to make a simple FPS game and it was astounding how much work was involved. Took 6 month of learning Unreal and Unity and gave up with a functioning prototype. Took 4 months of back and forth with Steam to list my game. Even harder trying to make money off it. I'm just in awe of Roblox, Minecraft, Fall Guy and all these other successes. We all love games but not everybody gets to make em. It's insane how much detail and granted we take for all the flood of games we have out now. It did make me change my stance on piracy. Somebody spent their sweat and blood bringing that game. We should pay for it what we can but won't be against emulation of retro ROMs.

adammunich 5y ago
Attention is competitive and you always have to churn out new stuff when running a game company.
jayd16 5y ago
Making a game is a deeply interdisciplinary exercise. Sound, visual art, storytelling, game theory, acting (voice or full body acting if motion capture) and of course many fields of technology, ai, graphics, core performance tuning, esoteric OS and hardware knowledge...and much more. We're also exposed to AAA works that easily took 500 highly skilled artisans several years to build. Expectations are sky high.
- junon 5y ago
  And even if you're not doing those things directly, you absolutely need to know how they all tie together and how they work at some level of proficiency in order to make a cohesive game.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I would add: there is also no "happy path" for gamers. Users will do everything they can within the game and you will spend a great deal of time handling those "edge cases" in code.
- duxup 5y ago
  I'm amazed any independent games get made considering all the skills needed, but that scene seems very rich in content... I always wonder how that is considering the breadth of knowledge required.
amelius 5y ago
> It did make me change my stance on piracy. Somebody spent their sweat and blood bringing that game. We should pay for it what we can but won't be against emulation of retro ROMs. I don't know about games, but in movies I don't care about the detail that CGI offers. Just give me a good story.
bpodgursky 5y ago
I know it sounds trite, but it really is supply and demand. So so so many developers want to build games. The market for developers making things that _aren't_ games is red-hot. But because they REALLY want to develop games, game companies can use them to their limit for low pay.
- foobarian 5y ago
  The game industry has the unique advantage that entry level developers spend their preceding 10-15 years playing games and building up a desire to make them. Imagine if kids had Enterprise Software consoles and played with Jira tickets on them. The rest of the industry would be swimming in applicants :-)
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
Modern AAA games involve an absolute ton of work, but the reason for the consistent overtime is that abusive labor practices have become institutionalized within the industry in the US. The EA lawsuit is a famous example, but truly is just the tip of the iceberg. Most gamedevs become personally invested in what they're doing enough that the studios/publishers know they can underpay and overwork their staff. I was briefly in the industry at the end of the 90s, and still talk with people in the biz today occasionally. From what they tell me things just keep getting worse on this point.
- rhexs 5y ago
  The easy fix to this is to not exempt “IT Professionals” from overtime in a bullshit rider on a completely unrelated law. Pay overtime, make it expensive to drive employees over 40 hours, and the problem disappears overnight.
  - SeanBoocock 5y ago
    That’s exactly what EA did in response to the “EA Spouse” episode. New grad employees are hired as hourly, non-exempt workers and paid overtime for their first couple years. The financial incentive alone doesn’t eliminate crunch, but it is one of many factors that has improved the culture at EA over the last 15 years.
emtel 5y ago
> What is it about game development field that makes it so labor intensive with consistent overtimes? I helped lead a team that built and shipped a 3D multiplayer game from scratch with a custom engine. I went into it expecting it to be harder than I thought it would be, and it was harder still. I think the thing that makes game dev fundamentally harder than other types of software is that most software products solve a problem or take away pain. So they only have to be good enough that the user is better off using the product than not using it. And there are still many problems out there that people face for which there is no solution. So even an imperfect solution might be quite good. Games on the other hand have to be so good that playing them is more fun/appealing/rewarding than the next best thing the player might do with those hours. While the technical challenges in some types of games are daunting, I suspect that even technically simpler games like 2d platformers are probably much harder to develop now than they were a few decades ago, due to necessity of competing against every other activity the player has to choose from.
- matt_s 5y ago
  I think this hits the nail on the head. There is a low barrier to solving someone's pain in creating a typical CRUD app. Its easy to pick an industry, find an application that could use some newer features and create something. Copying feature parity involves little creative work. There is no ceiling on making a game fun to play. Creative, fun ways to do crafting, leveling, fighting, puzzles, etc. can engage players to come back and replay content infinitely if that is the goal.
- JabavuAdams 5y ago
  This is a good observation. You can have a feature list for a game and complete every one (hah, who am I kidding!), but if the end product isn't fun, so what? It's not going to be successful, and all your effort is wasted. There's the in-principle estimatable work to implement all of the game systems and then there's all the other unpredictable work to actually make the damn thing fun. Feature-creep is endemic because creative directors/stake-holders can just move the goalposts or insist on their pet features / vision.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
mbesto 5y ago
> with consistent overtimes? One thing I've noticed about businesses that operate in the arts & entertainment space - people who do a lot of the labor have personal passions for their industry and are subsequently are willing to deal with employer abuses.
munk-a 5y ago
OT in the gaming field is insidious and mostly comes from the fact that the majority of your employees are salaried and working in fields where OT pay is not required. Overtime is an inefficient use of employee stress when compared to working regular hours - you'll burn people out and cause health issues in your workforce (a friend of mine had tension headaches when they worked too much OT - I turned to sugary drinks to keep myself going and put on weight). However, if the cost of those extra hours to the company is nothing then just see how quickly shops like EA are willing to force you into 20 hour days while you see nothing extra in your take home. Overtime laws need real overhauls and nobody should be able to bargain away standard working hours or it hurts all of us.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
1. it's a multidisplinary effort that involves interfacing not just with engineers, managers, and maybe clients, but with artist, writers, sound designers, and sometimes voice actors. Very, very few people will have the full scope of a large game in their mind makling a game. It also means one of these pieces can vastly slow down the entire pipeline if they get slowed down/behind schedule. 2. many traditional games operate on movie schedules; i.e. timing is everything. missing a launch at November vs. January can cost millions, and most sales are recuped in the first few months. So the pressure to hit deadlines is heavier than some continual service brining in a steady revenue stream. Granted, the rise of Games as a Service through the free-to-play model is starting to change this, for better or worse. 3. even within programming, there are so many topics that games delve into. Graphics programming, netcode, UI/UX design, (basic) AI, etc. you need some very specialized people to make these games, up there with a FAANG despite most studios making nowhere near that much. 4. you can't schedule "fun". Game design is almost a black box. If you flesh out this system and it just doesn't feel good, what do you do? delay the game and overspend on the budget? release it anyway and take the critical panning (spoilers, most games do this option)? this mixed with #1 means it's harder than usual to schedule, even with the widsom of "double the time needed". 5. more of a personal take here, but based on #4: games are much more "in tune" with the consumer audience than other media. core gamers watch games like hawks and it seems like everything being worked on is covered in NDA's. some onlooker would think these studios are hiding governemt secrets with how tight lipped industry keeps devs. This leads to many psychological factors, but as a TL;DR it means a) devs may have internal pressure to impress the audience compared to other sectors and b) consumers, being blacked boxed out of the process, underestimate how much work it is to make a game. A consumer base more internet saavy than any other medium before it, since gaming basically grew up with the internet side by side. It's many factors and I'm sure I haven't even covered half of them in that wall above. >I'm just in awe of Roblox, Minecraft, Fall Guy and all these other successes. I'm sure minecraft and roblox are impressed too. they took years to get to where they are, so they are some of the counterexamples to the traditional model I listed. Fall guys truly proves point #2. it came out at the perfect time (a time no one could predict far out enough to take advantadge of) and blew up for it.

0xy 5y ago

It's really weird how this article starts by showing how through negotiation and job searching you can increase your salary, but bizarrely then talks about unions, which are known to depress wages for top performers (just look at teachers unions, where pay is totally disconnected from competence and performance). If you're a really good game developer, artist or animator then you should learn the skill of negotiation and asking for what you want. Negotiation is an extremely important skill in life. So is knowing when to leave companies. I truly do not understand why anyone stays at these game studios for 5+ years and allows themselves to be absolutely robbed blind by pitiful wages and cost-of-living raises.

lend000 5y ago
You're probably being downvoted because you mentioned unions in a negative light, but your points are factually correct. Unions have a place for protecting unskilled workers, but what happens in game development is quite unique, because these workers are in-demand software engineers who typically have better options working in a less glorified field.
- sldksk 5y ago
  Most unions in the US are in fact only made up of skilled workers. Your point is just wrong.
  - minimuffins 5y ago
    I think you'll have a hard time sourcing that claim.
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/073015/top-5-most-unionized-industries.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/07301... The top 5 appear to be teachers, steelworkers, public service workers, autoworkers, and electrical workers. How many of these would you describe as "unskilled"?

bluescrn 5y ago

The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger :(

darknavi 5y ago
Which direction? The article doesn't give me a good sense for how European devs are getting paid.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  Vastly higher in the US (at least 2x, maybe 3x), judging from the #gamedevpaidme hashtag. Yeah, there's cost-of-living factors involved, but gamedev in the UK (and Europe?) just pays poorly. There's certainly money being made, but it's usually buying fancy cars for studio directors, not going into rewarding the dev team.
Nursie 5y ago
I don’t think it’s just games! UK software dev money is terrible, outside of contracting.
- ngngngng 5y ago
  Why in the world is software money so terrible in the UK? I always look up salaries and cost of living when traveling and the UK was one of the more surprising instances of that. It seems like the only way to live comfortably in London is in finance.
  - ck425 5y ago
    Software salaries aren't terrible in the UK, they're just not as crazy as the US. Most decent software engineers I know are comfortable in the 80th percentile of income or higher.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      I don't think software is terrible anywhere in the world, compared to local pay level. In many parts it's not at top, but it always decent. USA is just outlier. In other places it is comparable or slightly above other engineering disciplines...

q_andrew 5y ago

Unfortunately this probably won't be changing any time soon. Similar to the movie industry in CA, execs see game developers as totally replaceable, because they kind of are. There are so many people who are extremely passionate about making games, that they will jump after any opportunity, even when they know it isn't paying what it should. The only thing that might bring about some kind of reform is a union or a change in US/CA/UK labor laws.

Bukhmanizer 5y ago
One thing that I haven’t really seen mentioned is that the barrier for entry is high in a lot of video game development. Meaning, I can’t really take 3 of my friends and make the next GTA in my garage. Those type of games need developers, but also artists, writers, actors, etc. They’re expensive, risky operations of which development is only a part of. This is probably why it makes the most sense to treat developers as a commodity in the industry. The level at which the consumer interacts with the developer isn’t as high as say, a website.
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  Underrated comment. It's even worse when you consider that the engines are generally already made, you only need developers to do what you could almost call glorified scripting compared to engine development. I think Unity and Unreal probably have to pay their devs a reasonable salary. But having devs work in Unity or Unreal to produce a game is not really all that hard. That's kind of the point of Unity and Unreal.
  - luaKmua 5y ago
    Having done work in a variety of contexts from Game Engine development to working in Unity, what you are describing is only true for the most trivial of projects. Larger projects (especially AAA) have so much customization of the engines and pushing of their boundaries that they require just as much technical expertise as engine development for many of the required tasks. There are advantages and disadvantages for using these engines. They soften the "getting started" part of game dev for newer people, but for complicated projects it tends to be kicking the can down the road for dealing with deeper issues. You'd be hard pressed to squeeze good perf out Unity while fully using the HDRP and not understanding the ins and outs of the pipeline.

SamuelAdams 5y ago

This isn't unique to game dev. This is true in education as well - most white collar positions pay between 40 - 100k while vice presidents and presidents get 250k + packages. I think more developers need to get better at negotiating. One 10 minute conversation can beat years of 2-4% raises. It's all about setting expectations and being willing to walk away.

yurishimo 5y ago
Walking away is only powerful if you have leverage. Game devs, unlike a lot of other software, are not super in demand. You can't apply for an entry level job at EA and then pop over to Ubisoft instead when the offer from EA is crap. There are way more folks trying to break into game dev than there are jobs available.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I actually work for a AAA games company and what you said only applies at kind of junior/intermediate level. Hit senior/lead/expert and you can walk out and get another job in a week, it's super hard to hire seniors and above and those positions hold a lot of leverage. Edit: obligatory "above is true in my experience, YMMV"
  - dijit 5y ago
    I work(ed) for the same company as gambiting and can confirm this to be true. Hit Senior (easy to do after 5y) and game companies throw money at you to come over because getting people in who have a shipping mentality is hard- most people who want to be gamedevs see the glamour, those that ship see the pain a mile away and how to avoid it. The issue might be that most who become senior do not really move because the tool chains are largely different between companies. Frostbite and Snowdrop are incredibly different game engines and even those working on Unreal/Unity at the AAA level invariably maintain a fork due to limitations in the engine itself which makes it not compelling to sacrifice all your knowledge. Also, I find that most companies end up turning their C++ into a custom C++-like language with fancy types like growable hash tables and vectors. Many of which have quirks which require experience otherwise there can be footguns. (Some functions may be more correct but quadratic and others are fast but less precise and knowing when to use what is part of being a senior in some companies)

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago

Spoiler: Without reading it, it's shit. People go into it thinking they're in love with video games and get chewed out of the machine after a few years.

pasquinelli 5y ago
what i learned as a gamedev: the saying, "do what you love for a living and you never work a day in your life", is false. it's actually, "do what you love for a living and what you love becomes a job." what you need is a job you don't mind doing, which is the scam of higher education, because you plunk down all that money or debt or both, and years of time, and you get no guarantee that there'll be any job for you, but worse, you have no idea if you want to do that job. meanwhile, corporations have plenty of people to pick from who need to get a job in their field, either for financial reasons or psychological ones, who trained themselves at their own expense. the idea that such a large block of people are cornered into acting against their own interests and in the interests of such a small block of people almost makes one question the idea of liberal democracy.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  The one thing that has pissed me off the most about job markets is that companies have outsourced the training on you... the most common remark when interviewing is "we want someone be able to hit the ground right away" I remember hearing about companies actually training their people.
  - stevezsa8 5y ago
    So true. Each time I was hired, I was expected to learn on my own time. The best I could get was a $30 book paid for. I kinda assumed the company was responsible to train you. The only training I received was when I volunteered to be first aid for the office. But I assume it was only due to it being a legal requirement to have some trained people.
xtracto 5y ago
I second this sentiment. I did my BSc Soft. Eng. between 1999 and 2004. At the time I wanted so bad to get into game development. Being myself from a third world country there was no clear path to that. More or less at the same time, the infamous "EA Spouses" scandal broke, and after giving a good look at the industry I decided against it. 17 years later, I don't regret my decision at all. I'm at the top of my career, earning a USD salary, (around $150k USD) living in my third world country with great benefits and developing exciting things (fintech, crypto, etc). I still sometimes doodle around with Unity some weekends, for entertainment purposes

node-bayarea 5y ago

If my software is online and the company can make profit from across the world, why should I get paid locally?

chrisseaton 5y ago
There is no 'should' either way in a salary negotiation though - just what can you two agree on.
bidirectional 5y ago
Surely this line of thinking leads to lower salaries? Silicon Valley salaries are purely a function of the local labour market, Facebook still pays Oxford graduates in (insanely expensive) London a fraction of what they would be earning in the US.
- filleduchaos 5y ago
  > Surely this line of thinking leads to lower salaries? Only if one falls for the canard that employers anywhere - yes, in Silicon Valley as well - are actually paying their employees their full worth. If they were doing that, they wouldn't be making any money. Most of the companies that are large enough to be hiring internationally are already paying even their top-earning non-executive staff a tiny fraction of what they bring to the table. Any company that's trying to undercut that even more in the name of "location awareness" isn't a company I want to work at.

duxup 5y ago

What is the supply of labor like like when it comes to game development? It seems like there might be a huge number of folks who want to get into the game industry, but not as many jobs available? Could that have an impact on salaries? When I changed careers and attended a coding camp, there were a handful of very capable folks who had failed to get into the gaming industry noting how many other folks like them there were trying to break in. They had much less trouble getting into other (not gaming) areas after they retooled a bit.

mywittyname 5y ago
Wanting to be a game developer and being a good game developer are pretty different things. I'm sure that first shipped game to appear on your resume greatly increases the frequency and salary of offers. Also game development requires a lot of disparate skill sets. Artists are pretty much always underpaid relative to the amount of time and effort they put into their craft. The money there is always going to be as a lead/manager.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  Wanting to be a software developer and being a good software developer are pretty different things. However most good software developers make more money than good game developers.

Finage 5y ago

I believe cryptocurrency based gaming would be new level for game developers like Alice.

ashtonkem 5y ago

My standard advice to every graduate CS student is to stay the hell away from professional video game development. If you want to make games, turn it into a hobby instead.

ttul 5y ago
I dunno. My friend is making $250K working for Roblox. He’s 15yrs into his career - all game dev. Doesn’t seem too bad.
- dbish 5y ago
  15 years in software could get you a lot more outside game dev
  - Thaxll 5y ago
    Most dev in the US don't make 250k after 15years.
    - xvector 5y ago
      Most devs in the US don’t care about maximizing their career.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        Pay isn’t even the main reason I’d avoid gaming, it’s the tendency of game companies to grossly abuse their workers via crunch time and sudden studio closures that worries me. The same dynamics that suppress game dev salaries also lead companies to treating their workers as replaceable, which is a pretty bad situation to end up in.
    - dbish 5y ago
      Yes, but I think of Roblox like a FAANG in terms of success and money. If you moved to a FAANG with that experience you would likely make a good chunk more

Ekaros 5y ago

Supply and demand. If there is more people accepting lower rates then rates will be lower. Nothing wrong with that. It's not like many of the skills aren't at least some level of transferable. So if money is an issue try to find employment outside gaming sector. Like everyone else does when balancing income and job.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

My early salary history as a midwest gamedev: 17yo: unpaid intern, 1 year (2005) 18yo: $20k/yr (2006) 19yo: $35/yr (2007) 22yo: $70k/yr (2010) I don't regret it; I learned most of my skills during those formative years. But I was also "part of the problem" in the sense that I was happy as a clam being paid $20k/yr living at my parents' house, putting every dollar into the bank. Saved up $15k and felt like I was rich; it was great. I'm not sure there's anything to learn from my experience, since I was an outlier, but there y'go. I was also so completely dedicated to the idea of becoming a gamedev that I'm not sure anyone could have talked me out of it.

mywittyname 5y ago
This is pretty insightful. My (non-dev) career path followed a similar path (due to skipping college). Are you still in the gaming industry?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Nah, that last datapoint was also my last job as a gamedev. I went into finance (avoid, unless it's at a fund), security (avoid; you no longer build things), then ML (total immersion; happiest I've ever been).
munk-a 5y ago
To contrast - I only got into the gaming field briefly in Canada and after working at a med device company that paid me more as a junior dev than I ever got as a database and server specialist in gaming - 24yo:50k CA 26yo: 53k CA And at 28 I shifted to an insurance related software company and immediately got bumped to 80k which still wasn't that amazing. There was also a whole bunch of unpaid overtime while working in gaming.
ngold 5y ago
Good for you. You are not part of the problem, you figured out how to get a 4 year degree and they paid you for it. The problem how I see it is the lack of recurring revenue from your work. Sure pay shit, bUT if the game makes a billion dollars, you get a check every month. Employee owned businesses are the only hope I see for the future.

paulpauper 5y ago

being a game dev. seems like the worst tech job: few perks, minimal promotion opportunity, no ipo riches, no buyout riches, no lucrative stock options, high failure rate, low pay relative to revenues and exec pay, long hours, no credit, low salary cap, etc.

blacktriangle 5y ago
It's all about the environment. The pay was shit, but having the devs on another project letting you play their in-progress work and give real feedback at lunch or playing board games with the design team whose job is to literally go out to Walmart, buy board games, and come back and analyze them, then go home and play WoW in your company guild, its just not an experience you can get anywhere else. It may be an unpopular opinion, but game devs are paid correctly since game companies offer an experience and culture that is totally their own. It's too bad one eventually needs to move on to a inferior environment in search of more income and free time.
- stevezsa8 5y ago
  I've worked in many software companies. We had lunch time/after hours boardgames at every single one. OK, I was the one organising it, but still. Plus we got paid well. Win/win :]
  - JabavuAdams 5y ago
    Yeah, but the work is pretty boring to the kinds of personalities who like to work on games, even if it's often more important.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    That sounds like a nice environment, but it just doesn't hold a candle to working in a place where everybody from the office staff to the devs to the artists to the managers just lives and breaths gaming. Let me put this another way: there's a gaming group like you have where you have to drag everybody to the table occasionally at lunch time for some casual games, and then there's gaming groups where 6 of you show up to play Twilight Imperium every weekend and every person memorized the rules on their own time. Working at a game company is the later.

yummybear 5y ago

I’m not from the US, but is 150k considered a bad salary?

twodave 5y ago
It's heavily dependent on the region one lives in. In Jacksonville, FL, for instance, $150k+ is mostly reserved for SVP/C-level folks.
bb611 5y ago
It's about 50% above average for the country, but HN tends to have a very coastal crowd, in particular a lot of SV talent where average pay is much higher. Experienced people easily break $200k, at my (non-FAANG) company the entry level package for Bay Area devs is more than $150k.

twodave 5y ago

The skill required to perform a job isn't the only consideration when determining its cost. I grew up with the dream of working for Blizzard or the like. The truth is, gaming is a major gateway into the programming world. Kids grow up playing these games and dream about what it would be like to be able to create something so spectacular. Many of us who went through with learning to build software took a different path, either due to location restraints or economics or just lack of ability. These wage discrepancies are not caused by companies paying crap wages. It's caused by game developers who are willing to accept living in a high-cost area alongside earning crap wages. If you're in game development and want to be paid more, step out of game development and optionally move to a more affordable area. If you're competent you'll end up with a pay raise and better working/life balance. If you're hell-bent on working your dream job in a high-cost location, you should be cognizant that it's lots of other people's dream job, too (many of whom have put it aside, but would return in a heartbeat if the compensation were comparable). You've chosen to put money in the back seat. TL;DR - until more people start making the economical choice, game development salaries will continue to be low.

socialist_coder 5y ago

Just to have a bit of a counter argument from me, a game developer who loves games and has worked in the US games industry for the majority of my 20 years career: If your argument is "You can make more at a FAANG company" - well yeah, you can. You don't work in gaming because you want to make the top salary. You work in gaming because you love games and you enjoy having all your coworkers also love games and being able to talk to all of them about games and having your company culture revolve around games and gaming. It's games all the way down! It's a completely different work environment. As someone who loves games, the best years of my working career were when I was working on game teams, not at tech companies. Also, developer salaries in games is still plenty good. It's still great money. I never felt like I was losing out. Also the argument that it's "grueling 80+ hour weeks day in and day out is" is bullshit! The only time I ever worked 80 hours in a single week was when I was starting out in Quality Assurance and I was getting paid hourly so I was happy to make the extra overtime. As a salaried developer I don't think I was ever expected to work more than 60 hours a week, and then after the crunch was over we always got 1 or 2 weeks of extra vacation ("comp time"). To be clear, the normal working schedule was 40 hours per week. Crunch time is like 1 or 2 times a year, for maybe 1-2 months each time. And like I said, depending on how much you crunch, you would get extra paid time off afterwards. So for me, that was a pretty good trade. I'd much rather work my ass off for a couple months and then get an extra 2 week vacation at the end of it. Maybe some game companies treat their employees like dirt and work them into the ground, but the ones I've worked for, I never felt that way. Don't work at those terrible companies! There are plenty of "good" game companies out there who pay good salaries and have good working conditions. As someone who is older now with kids, my priorities are definitely different than when I worked in games during my 20s and early 30s. I would no longer be happy working those 60 hour weeks. I want a better work life balance. So I don't know if I could work on a game team like that anymore. But do I regret working there before I had a family? Absolutely not. #gamedev4life

Impossible 5y ago
It's also possible to work on games or game like software at FAANG, not crunch (although FAANG companies have plenty of other toxic qualities that can make them worse than a game job in subtle ways) and get paid a FAANG salary.

swyx 5y ago

because this post and the linked bloomberg post was frustratingly light on detail: - the blizzard spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpUOMpyarcMsNzid-nA1OqbXkA/htmlview?pru=AAABc9xm048*IoWzMOeJOOiSRFAKtwbe_g https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/119RI3oS9XNOjq2X8VLpU... - visualizations: https://imgur.com/a/OBG7Fch https://imgur.com/a/OBG7Fch

stewx 5y ago

I looked at the salaries people are posting, and what I am seeing is people (at least the ones comfortable with posting this kind of info on the Internet) rapidly climbing from $30-50k/yr USD to $75-150k/yr USD. These are excellent wages. They may be lower than outside the video game industry, but by any other standard they are phenomenally good wages, in the top 1% globally and at least the top 10-20% in developed countries. In terms of income, these people are unambiguously part of the upper class.

ctvo 5y ago
It isn't about how the salary compares globally. It's about how does this compare to their peers. The asymmetrical nature of information available to employees vs. information available to the company generally leads to employees undervaluing themselves. By sharing what others in the company or in the region make for the same job, we help people ask for more.
- Pfhreak 5y ago
  And furthermore, it's how it compares to the profits of the company. If an engineer is returning $500,000k annually in profit to a company from their work, and getting paid $75k of that, they are being exploited. (Or at the very least are undervaluing their labor.)
  - bogwog 5y ago
    That's an unnatural/weird way to look at it. If the engineer provides $500k value per year, and they get paid $500k per year, the company makes $0 profit. By that logic, the only way to not be underpaid is for the company to be in the red; but if that happens, there won't be a company to pay you! Plus, it's likely any other engineer could provide the same value. So (as always) it's about supply and demand. In this case, there are a lot of qualified engineers that want to work in games, and relatively few positions. Unions could affect that, but I think it'd do more harm than good at the high end (it would definitely help lower paid positions like QA though). Maybe if Epic wins their case against Apple, it'll unleash a tidal wave of anti-trust lawsuits against the likes of Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, etc. and the game industry will explode with new business opportunities, new investments, and new jobs to balance out the supply/demand curve for game developers at all levels! (...or not)

hintymad 5y ago

Game development is arguably technically harder than typical CRUD-type of app development, even if one uses a game engine. I was wondering if it's simply a matter of supply and demand. So many great programmers want to work on games, hence driving down the salary in the industry.

julienb_sea 5y ago

This is ultimately a supply and demand issue. Google pays high salaries because they have to in order to hire the talent they want. Game devs apparently do not have to, because they are able to fill their roles for lower salaries. Don't pretend like all tech companies wouldn't love to lower dev salaries, they just can't because they wouldn't be able to hire. Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator, which is that working in a gaming context is something people actually value and are willing to give up potential compensation for. This seems especially true at the junior level, which depresses junior salaries relative to other tech companies. Also, comparing compensation against US FAANG hiring is beyond insane. They pay ridiculous salaries due to the extremely limited and competitive market for hires that meet their caliber. This has driven up salaries, but should NOT be treated as an indicator for what "reasonable" pay looks like across the entire industry.

StreamBright 5y ago
And the locations FAANGs are operate also tend to be the most expensive parts of US.
- xtqctz 5y ago
  This is fact which feels related, but doesn't have much to do with labor market wage equilibrium.
  - Retric 5y ago
    High cost of living areas push people away when the local job market slumps. So, the equilibrium does end up relating to high housing costs just indirectly. Aka, if they paid less the local population drops which would reduce supply.
deleted 5y ago
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jaaron 5y ago
It's not just that. Google (and a few others) dealt with retention issues from startups and other companies in SV who's sole recruiting strategy was poach from Google, ie- use Google as a filter and let them do all the work finding great talent and then we'll just hire Googlers (or one of the other major SV tech companies). So retention is a significant factor for Google and other FAANG companies. They can simply pay enough to make sure other companies can't come in and take their talent.

stunt 5y ago

I don't remember now but I thought many contracts require employees to keep it confidential! Or not?

paxys 5y ago
That is illegal in the USA.

sadpolishdev 5y ago

Makes me sad as a polish game-developer, who decided never to work in my country again. I have 15+ years of experience, I've made games for ps2 and original xbox aside PCs, and until i've left the "national" gamedev industry, my salaries were (monthly) along these numbers: around 2005ish: 3d artist / junior - 600usd 3d artist / mid - 800usd around 2009ish: 3d artist / team lead: 1100usd 3d artist / senior / team lead 1200usd around 2012ish: 3d artist / senior / team lead / delegated to maintain and oversee a remote office in other side of the country - 1200usd + rent paid (around 300usd) 2014 decided to leave any employment, and started own company that freelance/outsource work - salary quadrupled (after taxes). Since then, I had a steady rose in hourly rates, so its not comparable to normal local gamedev salaries at any point. Its ok to love games and want to make games. Just dont be exploitable idiot, and working on AAA title that sells millions for 1000usd/month, while beign called mid, or lead for 2.5k usd/month for having responsibility of evaluating several other teammates work.

danielrpa 5y ago

I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game job was much, MUCH better than FAANG. No matter how many fancy drinks and energy bars FAANG gives me, if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get employees, otherwise many people would simply work elsewhere. There is a myth that working at FAANG is amazing for everybody, but most people I know there are actually kind of miserable and doing fairly dull work for which they are massively overqualified. Nonetheless, these companies have money and they want the "best" (in their eyes) people for everything, so they pay for it... Well, it's a decent deal.

thewarrior 5y ago
There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ? I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so many people in detail. It’s a juicy target for recruiter raiding. And just like you can’t get fired for hiring IBM you can’t get fired for hiring FANG. This attracts yet more talent. But yes the level of the engineers is not as great as the salaries would suggest. But on the flip side for anyone doing hiring. If you want some wicked smart devs who don’t ask for as much then look at game devs.
- Sevii 5y ago
  FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out. Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.
- kenhwang 5y ago
  FAANG doesn't need "the best", but they do need to deny upstart competition that talent.

flakiness 5y ago

In Japan, the game and anime industries are called "aspiration industry" because of the reasons discussed here. There is also a term "aspiration abuse". That is because it's not only about the market dynamics (supply vs demand) but also a information asymmetry involved. It is considered more like a problem of immigration brokers: They sell dreams, but many of them are fake.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
in all fairness, if the stories on Japan are true there isn't such thing as a healthy work/life balance period. At that point, if I'm gonna spend half my life (and 90% of my waking life) at work, I may as well try and like doing what I do.

a_t48 5y ago

I left the gaming industry for robotics. I'm lucky in a number of ways (no college degree, no robotics background), but the salary and WLB is so much better here. My last job was FAANG level salary/bonuses, my current company is a bit smaller but maybe we'll get there at some point. Don't get me wrong - I _miss_ it. So much. I know it's Stockholm Syndrome, but the people in the industry are my people and I miss shipping games. The work is very interesting (not that my current job isn't). But my life outside of work has improved so much after leaving - I likely won't ever go back. I remember being told "why would you want to do that?" when I told a gamedev friend I wanted to join the industry. I didn't get what he meant then, but now I do. If some young programmer wanted to get in now...well - I wouldn't dissuade them - it's a great way to get a lot of experience and work on cool stuff - but go in eyes wide open. Maybe have an exit plan. Off the top of my head I know a dozen excellent developers I worked with in the past who have left games for greener pastures (most of them robotics - the 3D math experience and ability to work with large codebases carry over well).

gameswithgo 5y ago

I an 42 on the usa and three years ago when job hunting got five offers. non game offers were in the 140-150 range, some with equity on top, gamedev was 110 (EA) I might have taken it but for the looong commute. glad i didnt though!

ineptech 5y ago

I don't know why this is limited to game developers. I'm a mgr/dir and it seems obvious to me that secrecy around salaries is consciously perpetuated because it allows corporations to get away with underpaying some people. I can't think of any circumstance where it wouldn't be in the individual contributors' best interests to tell each other exactly what they all make. If everyone on my teams shared their salaries with each other, it would lead to two things: a) some short-term bad blood and awkwardness, and b) some underpaid people getting raises or quitting. And I think my bosses, especially the old-school ones, consciously play up a) and treat salary as a giant taboo to avoid b).

werber 5y ago
I've always been very open with coworkers about salaries. And in my experience the underpaid people were always not like me ( white and male ) and frequently better at their jobs than me.
egypturnash 5y ago
Because that's who decided to start doing this to try and create more openness in their particular industry. Talk to a few people in your industry, see who you can get to share their salaries, try and get the ball rolling on #MyIndustryPaidMe.
Pfhreak 5y ago
Levels.fyi exists. There are internal spreadsheets at various tech companies that share their comp. Agreed though, I'd love to see this elsewhere in tech.
throw123123123 5y ago
It's a tragedy of the commons situation. You can share yours and nobody shares theirs, so you lose a bit. You need a large number to make it work effectively. I personally never feared sharing my salary, but even after that not a single person ever in multiple jobs shared their salary with me.
goatinaboat 5y ago
I can't think of any circumstance where it wouldn't be in the individual contributors' best interests to tell each other exactly what they all make. If everyone on my teams shared their salaries with each other, it would lead to two things: a) some short-term bad blood and awkwardness, and b) some underpaid people getting raises or quitting. And I think my bosses, especially the old-school ones, consciously play up a) and treat salary as a giant taboo to avoid b). A previous employer explicitly stated in their contract that disclosing your salary was a disciplinary offence!

throwkeep 5y ago

> Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe These are to be taken with a pound of salt. Location, experience, performance, timing, negotiation skills, stock options, etc, make these simplistic salary comparisons highly misleading. > to encourage pay transparency in their industry. That's the hook, but these Twitter hashtag campaigns are thinly veiled brag fests. The game devs who push these live in high COL areas, tend to be veterans and want to show the world their 6 figure salary. Which looks incredible to most of their followers. Every time they get these hashtags trending, the "you make that much? you rock!" responses flow in.

Vaslo 5y ago

Are there just too many games? I basically rotate my time between a space mmo called Dual Universe and Red Dead Redemption 2 on the ps5. That’s it - I pay a monthly fee for DU and paid 60 bucks a few years ago for RDR2. That’s it. That’s all the gaming I really need for months. Go to the web or steam up and see a plethora of games and realize how little share of wallet most of these games get. Unfortunately it’s not enough to pay some designers any decent salary. Sad to say but it may be a problem that works itself out through survival of the fittest. Only the best games will get the most bucks and the rest will languish. But if there isn’t enough time for them, should they really exist in the first place?

Jagerbizzle 5y ago

I've worked in the Games industry since 1997. I got my first year-long job fresh out of high school in QA at EA in Canada, worked summers over the following years while getting my degrees, transitioned to a programming role after university, and ultimately moved to the US in 2013 for work in games at one of the big tech companies. 1997-2003 - QA @ EA, ~$9-12 an hour (CAD), 1.5x for hours 40-48, 2x > 48 hours. We worked a lot of 90 hour weeks, and I had no life outside of work, so I had a lot of spare cash. 2003-2008 - Game Dev in Eastern Canada. Started at 40k a year, ended at 62k a year (CAD). 2008-2013 - Game Dev in Western Canada, started at 80k a year, ended at 100k per year (CAD). Got promoted to "senior" in 2010 and managed a team of 6 programmers during my last year and a half prior to leaving. 2013-present - Moved to the United States at a big tech company that does games. Took a role-demotion to be a non-senior IC for a wage-promotion of 135k a year USD. Presently have a similar role to the one I left in Canada (albeit a much larger team) and make >350k USD a year.

lsiebert 5y ago

It's interesting the compare dev salaries, but are folks aware of how high executive compensation at gaming companies, much less FANG companies, is?

bennysomething 5y ago

Am I supposed to feel sorry for games developers? Like they are some exploited sweat shop workers? One example in there a person was earning 150k+. They started off low and due to experience increased their salary. We keep getting told how awful the games industry is. I'm doubtful, why would so many people continue to work in it? At the very least any of the programmers could move to other sectors. I'm guessing the answer is the type of work. It's highly creative unlike business programming.

thecleaner 5y ago

Devs in Europe be like - are these supposed to be low salaries ?

diveanon 5y ago

After leaving the vfx industry for web dev I doubled my salary. I guess the moral is that game / vfx studios need to start chasing dumb VC cash.

wanttobethatkid 5y ago

When making games are hard and make huge profit why are the salaries low? I doubt the argument that there are vast number of game developers who are passionate and are willing to take low salary. The reason is if that is the case why don't they make their own games? My hypothesis is to make game only few people in the team need high skill and the majority need low skill hence the compensation is low as the entry is easy and supply is high.

throwaway_eu123 5y ago

Anyone feeling like sharing insights about what it's like in the EU? It will probably highly depend on the country/region (wild guessing that salaries in eastern EU are lower) but these salaries are beyond my wildest dreams. I live in Belgium, work for an international company, I have a master's degree in computer science, speak three languages fluently (French, English, Spanish) and have been working for 10 years as a software engineer, I currently get paid 2500 EUR net per month (+ a company car, fuel card and some other minor benefits [lunch ticket and such]). Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2500,0 EUR (net, started at 1750 EUR) × 1,7 (various taxes) x 13 (everybody has a "13th month" in this field) -------- 55250 EUR (gross) Yes, anything related to health is cheaper here but even if you factor that in...