The Game Career Guide shows us the results of Game Developer's sixth annual survey of game industry salaries.
There's seven pages of results and bar graphs for you to go through, but here are the highlights:
- Programming is where the money is at (average at $80,000+)
- Game Testing is not where the money is at
- A Master's degree doesn't necessarily equate to higher pay
- Experience does equate to higher pay, so hang in there
- It is difficult to get into game design right out of college
- The development industry is made of of mostly males
While programmers had the highest average pay, that came only after some years of experience were put under their belts. Producers had the highest pay and bonuses, but the average pay comes out to a bit less than programmers. Artists and animators make a bit less than the rest of the guys, but those with even less than 3 years experience are still pulling in a respectable average of over $42,000. Not bad. Those poor game testers make the least, but there's some hope for those to make it to a QA lead position.
[thanks to The Golden Donut]
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
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Contest:
12:43 PM on 09.04.2007
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but as scrixx said if yer happy yer set!
Imma gettin paid gettin laid, yo!
Yea. They really need to cut them a bigger piece of the Pi chart. Without testers, how would designers and programmers know what to fix? How would they even be able to release it without the penniless testers slamming through waves and waves of gameplay to fix the annoying bugs? You may not realize it, but without testers, games wouldn't be as in-depth as they are now. Who knows? There could be the Headsliding glitch in every game instead of clipping or choppy animation.
yeh i know but thats basicly the only entry level position in game design.
i hopefully will end up as a texture artist and 3d modeler.
Where are most game developers these days? I work in NYC as a programmer and they have shipped a lot of IT jobs to North Carolina.