How Much Game Makers Get Paid

Demon_Skeith

Demon_Skeith

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Making video games sure looks like a fun gig from the outside, doesn't it? Pouring your talents into a creation that can get played by thousands or even millions of people worldwide is not something many people can say that they do. But bragging rights and cool points don't pay bills. Just how much did video game designers, programmers and artists earn in 2013? Let's take a look.

Thousands of game-makers participated in Gamasutra's annual salary survey earlier this year and the results—broken down by creative discipline and focusing on the state of he industry in the U.S.—have just been made available. Is a career in game making a worthwhile pursuit, financially speaking? Depends on what you do and who you do it with.

The average overall compensation of American game developers was $83,060. The average annual salary for a solo indie game-maker in $11,812, down a whopping 4% from last year. But if you were part of a crew of indies, things were better with an average of $50,833. Programmers earn the most cash, pulling down an average of $93,251 a year. Artists and animators get about $74,349, while producers and game designers were paid $82,286 and $73,864 respectively. A fuller breakdown (remember these are averages):

  •     Programmers: $93,2511
  •     Artists and animators: $74,349
  •     Game Designers: $73,8642
  •     Producers: $82,286
  •     Quality Assurance: $54,833
  •     Audio: $95,682
  •     Business & management: $101,5723

Despite the seemingly constant layoffs the industry faces, salaries have largely increased from five years ago. The report notes that gender pay equity is still a long ways off—despite being better than the national average—with women $13,000 less a year for doing the same work. You can look at the whole salary survey here.
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not bad for a stressful job.
 
Indeed, like DS mentioned the programming part is often significantly harder. I mean if there is a glitch in a level these are the people who have to isolate and then fix it. They may have to comb through thousands of lines of code to find the few spots where the issue is. (Plus they often take the heat if a game is buggy, along with the quality assurance/testers, since they "let" it go in that state. Even if in cases there was nothing they could do because management ordered the game to ship on and then wouldn't allow more time to fix all the bugs.)

Othertimes they're charged with building the engine used to make games. So even before the production of an actual game starts they're building the tools they'll need to make games.
 
OMG so much for each and every division. Man they really deserve these money. They work hard and give the best.
 
Those sort of people sure make a whole lot of money.. Maybe I could get into something like that and much a bunch of money like they do. That would be amazing! I know my ahead of time career if you know what I mean! ;)
 
dfarmer2001 said:
Those sort of people sure make a whole lot of money.. Maybe I could get into something like that and much a bunch of money like they do. That would be amazing! I know my ahead of time career if you know what I mean! ;)
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assuming you can find a job, the market is crowded from what I hear.
 
It is sad that  "The average annual salary for a solo indie game-maker in $11,812, down a whopping 4% from last year." since a solo indie game maker would most likely have to do all the programming, graphics, sound, story writing, tech support, etc, or hire someone for a few hours to days to help him with his game.

I agree with DS, the market is over crowded sort of like mobile Game Apps on smartphones/tablets where there are too many Apps, and only a few Apps like Temple Run, Angry Birds, and Clash of Clans are making enough money.
 
My brother is a very lucky guy or at least he will be when he finally manages to become hired by someone. He has just finished University where he trained to be a game designer and has just finished after 3 years of college and 3 of University with a degree. Looks like he will be doing well for himself once he gets himself out there looking at those figures :)
 
Shortie861 said:
My brother is a very lucky guy or at least he will be when he finally manages to become hired by someone. He has just finished University where he trained to be a game designer and has just finished after 3 years of college and 3 of University with a degree. Looks like he will be doing well for himself once he gets himself out there looking at those figures :)
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the market is full of people looking for a job and developers seem to close down every year, it's a tough job.
 
Demon_Skeith said:
the market is full of people looking for a job and developers seem to close down every year, it's a tough job.
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Using Kickstarter for crowd funding, and becoming a solo Indie developer could be a good option for making games if the game is good. A lot of newer games, and game consoles like Ouya uses Kickstarter. But, it maybe harder to reach the funding goal these days since there are probably a lot of Indie game makers who are using Kickstarter to fund their games.

I think the days of the large developers like THQ are mostly over since they need to pay staff too much money, and hopefully get back the money from selling a lot of $60 games. There will probably be more solo indie game makers like the maker of Flappy Birds, and smaller game studios like Mojang which made Minecraft than big game studios.
 
It can be risky if you spend a lot of money on a Kickstarter intro video,  paid blog posts, and promotions to get the public attention to crowd fund the game.

Starting out making smaller games like flash games, small PC Games, and Ouya games, and getting  more popular before starting a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter would be a good idea since game makers will have fans of the game makers smaller games which will cause fans to more likely fund a bigger game on Kickstarter.

Setting the funding goal lower like $75,000 instead of $100,000 will also help get more backers.

Ouya originally had a funding goal of $950,000, and they got almost $8.6 million in pledges. I think if Ouya ask for $5 million, they won't have reach such a high pledge amount.
 
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