What Do Game Developers Make In Salary?

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Other than that pesky "laid off after every new game ships" thing, it looks like you can make a pretty damn good living being a game developer.

Overall, game developers within the U.S. managed to make $83,060 on average over the course of 2013, and while that's a high number, it's actually a lower one than 2012, down 2 percent. The business and management salaries seem to rule overall, averaging $101,572, while audio professionals ($95,682) and programmers ($93,521) follow closely behind. As to who makes the least amount of money, quality assurance professionals sit at the bottom with $54,833. Still not too shabby, tho.
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Yeah, but what does it equate to in effective hourly rate?
 
quality assurance professionals sit at the bottom with $54,833
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Good to know I basically make barely more than a guy that plays video games all day.
 
I have a friend who once dated someone in Treyarch. The yearly total hours are around the same, but the crunch before launches are really heavy. They just disappear during crunch time, then get weeks to a month off after launch stabilizes.
 
Friend of mine does this and hates the constant hire/fire aspect of it. Money is good, but then you can go a while with no income depending on projects. He is on retainer, but that doesn't mean there will be a project to work on once his is done. He says a lot of the time his will get out, and he has to wait a month or 2 before he gets landed in another. Save, save, save.
 
Yeah, but what does it equate to in effective hourly rate?
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Hmm. Not a game developer (and not mentioning the salary) but as a medical imaging researcher / developer I used to work 80 hour weeks for months on end. If I was paid by the hour I would be retiring by now @ 42.
 
Glad i decided to stick with a software engineering degree with a focus on HCI.

Game-deving just aint what it use to be.
 
Dirty tactics....just dirty being laid off after the success of the game job hopping isn't fun.
 
Parja said:
Yeah, but what does it equate to in effective hourly rate?
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It's probably half-way decent early in the product cycle. I've known devs that worked 18 hour days during crunch periods toward the end of development for games. At that point, not good at all. Average it all out, and it doesn't really look that attractive. Not to mention two of the guys on that team lost their wives during some of those crunch cycles. One of them went a little off the deep end too for a while. He was lucky to have recovered (mostly) from that.
 
Crunch time for Call of Duty Advance Warfare must be the biggest disaster know to mankind =)

a. Got the FPS check

b. Green screen Military dog Riley check

c. Uber weapons based on real and fantasy military spec check
 
Huh...

These figures seem kind of low to me.

An friend of a friend was a programmer at Harmonix in Boston, and I got the impression he was in the 150-200 range...

Maybe its like everything else, in geographic regions where living expenses are higher, incomes are too?
 
Its about on par with the Average Software Engineering salary. The big difference is in job security. Working at bigger tech firms typically gives you better security than a game dev will
 
Zarathustra[H];1040975043 said:
Huh...

These figures seem kind of low to me.

An friend of a friend was a programmer at Harmonix in Boston, and I got the impression he was in the 150-200 range...

Maybe its like everything else, in geographic regions where living expenses are higher, incomes are too?
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I have heard similar things. It probably has to do with the high burn out rate of Game Developers.
 
BreezeDM said:
I have heard similar things. It probably has to do with the high burn out rate of Game Developers.
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Game devs absolutely will not be in the 150-200k range, unless they are Cheif or Staff level with their company, possibly even directors. That is much much higher than any principle software engineer can expect in any market
 
The guys responsible for the audio in games get paid close to 100K? Really? Because the sound mixing in games are pure shit.
 
What people don't understand is that sure 83K to 100K sounds great on paper but you have to factor in cost of living which in some of those tech rich areas is very high. Also don't forget that if you have to work 12-15 days including weekends, you are making less an hour. Time = Money.
 
That's chump change man.

My wife is just a fucking barber and she makes a good $75,000 a year after you factor in tips and shit.

Shit, She works a little harder then most at it, but her school was 9 months, the work ain't that tough. When it's slow she can sit on her ass and play with her phone and no one will say shit about it. When it's busy the time flies, and the best fucking thing all the way around is that no one will ever ever not even once demand that she update a cert and require any of the other crap that happens to IT people all the fucking time. I wish I had chosen a career like hers when I retired from the Army but I got too much onto this one and the end is so close.
 
The wages for IT people just suck when it comes to what we have to put up with and go through all the time. This article only convinces me that it ain't no better for those dream developer jobs unless you do it the Mark Zuckerberg way.

It's the business world's way of pissing on the smart little geeky guys, tell them how much you love them but feed them shit and piss in their Mountain Dews every chance you get.
 
Just wanted to note that this survey only includes salaried employees. The QA numbers in particular are misleading as most are hourly workers and make far, far less than $50k a year.
 
They probably work 2x more hours a week than most non-gaming software developers too
 
I doubt most people that get into Game Deving, are doing it for the money. It's usually because, it's something they WANT to do.
 
fdiaz78 said:
What people don't understand is that sure 83K to 100K sounds great on paper but you have to factor in cost of living which in some of those tech rich areas is very high. Also don't forget that if you have to work 12-15 days including weekends, you are making less an hour. Time = Money.
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From experience, absolutely correct. $83-100k won't go far at all in many of the locations where developers are located e.g., NYC, LA, Montreal, SF. It's more like making 50k somewhere like mid-Ohio, and forget about owning where you live on that salary.
 
harmattan said:
From experience, absolutely correct. $83-100k won't go far at all in many of the locations where developers are located e.g., NYC, LA, Montreal, SF. It's more like making 50k somewhere like mid-Ohio, and forget about owning where you live on that salary.
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That was my thought as well. I was surprised how little they are paid. 80-100k isn't even enough to get you what many would consider a 'good' apartment in many of these cities.
 
lcpiper said:
That's chump change man.

My wife is just a fucking barber and she makes a good $75,000 a year after you factor in tips and shit.

Shit, She works a little harder then most at it, but her school was 9 months, the work ain't that tough. When it's slow she can sit on her ass and play with her phone and no one will say shit about it. When it's busy the time flies, and the best fucking thing all the way around is that no one will ever ever not even once demand that she update a cert and require any of the other crap that happens to IT people all the fucking time. I wish I had chosen a career like hers when I retired from the Army but I got too much onto this one and the end is so close.
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Your wife is probably a badass barber then, because I'm pretty sure the average chumps at Great Clips would be lucky to clear 30 grand a year including tips.
 
Damn, yet another site that's blocked at work. I'll check the game developer salaries from home.
 
Frankie said:
Your wife is probably a badass barber then, because I'm pretty sure the average chumps at Great Clips would be lucky to clear 30 grand a year including tips.
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My barber shop charges $10 per head. I usually give a $5 tip because I like everyone there.

So anyway, at $15 per haircut, $75k would take 5,000 haircuts. Assuming that a person works 5 days a week and takes 3 weeks vacation/holiday in a year, that works out to ~20 haircuts a day, or one every 25 minutes assuming an 8 hour work day.

So it's certainly feasible, depending on how high the chair fee is.

People usually talk about the advantages of going to college when it comes to lifelong earnings, but the truth is, a lot of blue collar type jobs pay surprisingly well when you do the math.

Makes me wonder if going to school for engineering was worth it, when I could have just pursued a trade like becoming an electrician or something.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040976962 said:
My barber shop charges $10 per head. I usually give a $5 tip because I like everyone there.

So anyway, at $15 per haircut, $75k would take 5,000 haircuts. Assuming that a person works 5 days a week and takes 3 weeks vacation/holiday in a year, that works out to ~20 haircuts a day, or one every 25 minutes assuming an 8 hour work day.

So it's certainly feasible, depending on how high the chair fee is.

People usually talk about the advantages of going to college when it comes to lifelong earnings, but the truth is, a lot of blue collar type jobs pay surprisingly well when you do the math.

Makes me wonder if going to school for engineering was worth it, when I could have just pursued a trade like becoming an electrician or something.
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The cap in engineering is higher than it is in trades, unless you own your own contracting company. Engineering (at least EE or Software E) you can expect to retire @ 120k-150k if your not management level.
 
VladDracule said:
That is much much higher than any principle software engineer can expect in any market
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You don't know what you are talking about. I am a principle software engineer and I make right in the middle of that range. And there are some here that make more than me.
 
Your wife is probably a badass barber then, because I'm pretty sure the average chumps at Great Clips would be lucky to clear 30 grand a year including tips.
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LOL, Yes well she does cut hair on an Army Training base where the soldiers have to get a fresh regulation sheering every two weeks whether they need it or not. She get's paid to be fast and when she is done there isn't much left to critique :D
 
Zarathustra[H], the math is a little different for her on base. Haircuts are somewhere between $7 and $8 dollars, not sure, but she get's something like 68% of the haircut cost + tips. On a very busy day it takes her 3 minutes from the time she sets the guys butt in the chair to the time she is punching buttons on the register and the next guy is already getting seated. She has cut over 100 haircuts in a 6 hour day before so .69 x 8 = 5.44 for the haircut, and give her a $1.50 average on tips, the customers are mostly young and they rarely feel they are getting a grand experience or royal treatment, still, they do tip frequently, just not as much. So we got 6.94 x 100 haircuts for that good busy Sunday = a $694 day. So close to $700 for each Sunday of the week in a month so she pulls in $2,800 a month just for Sundays, add her other 4 workdays in and just ballpark it at $800 more so $1,500 a week x 4 weeks is $6K a month, 12 months is $72K a year and some of that money is tip money sooo. I am probably being conservative on the tips too, $75K before taxes is a pretty sure bet.
 
Of course, like I said earlier, she works hard for it. You can't give 100 guys a haircut in 6 hours without busting your ass non-stop. Woman works harder then I do for her money.
 
VladDracule said:
Then your extremely lucky along with those that make more than you. Average Salary of High level software engineers is going to be in the 100-150k range even at the top companies

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louisco...hest-paying-companies-for-software-engineers/
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Those are "average base salary for software engineers" listed. Atthose companies, by the time you get to retirement it is not unreasonable for a software engineer to be making 150+.

Of course not everyone works for those companies.
 
jimmyb said:
Those are "average base salary for software engineers" listed. Atthose companies, by the time you get to retirement it is not unreasonable for a software engineer to be making 150+.

Of course not everyone works for those companies.
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Yeah, the average doesn't say much in and of itself without a standard deviation
 
Zarathustra[H];1040977273 said:
Yeah, the average doesn't say much in and of itself without a standard deviation
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Its rather accurate based off of numbers on IEEE polls as well. 150k+ is not what youd expect as a principle engineer unless you are in a very favorable position with your company. And i am a principle engineer so i can back up the numbers they give
 
I'd rather know what different tiers of indie game devs make on different platforms.

Take games of different success levels in the market, and different pricing models (paid vs freemium), different platforms (smartphones/tablets vs pc) - and give the estimates of typical salaries.


Is that most of them make next to nothing, but a few make millions? Or is the income slightly less hockey stick shaped up the scale?
 
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