Game developers are slightly richer, new research shows
The average salary for a game developer is £31,964, according to new data.
A comprehensive salary survey conducted by Develop and MCV saw hundreds of industry people bare all on the numbers in their wage slips.
The development community’s earnings revealed somewhat positive news, with salaries up around £1,500 on last year’s figures.
Meanwhile the average publishing and marketing salary was put at £44,643, around £15,000 more than those at the heart of the industry.
The news comes after separate data showed that the average development budget for a multiplatform next-gen game is $18-$28 million.
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A further breakdown of Develop and MCV’s data can be found here. The figures show that average PR salaries are just a shade under £29,000, with retail-associated workers making an average of £27,738. Average games press salaries stand at £18,000.
The figures obtained to calculate developer budgets are given as a median average, discounting higher salaries from top-level execs in excess of £100,000.
I don't know anyone on my team who earns 32k....
While I don't doubt this figures are accurate, it might be more enlightening if it was broken down more. I'm pretty sure artists and qa are on the lower side while programmers are earning more. Mashing that together you get your 32k average. I'd also suggest that smaller companies are paying less for skills, and there is mostly likely a north south divide also. I suggest that that is why monkey-boy is seeing what he says he is seeing.
Yes - we'll be breaking down the development data into both average salaries by region and discipline (and also within the latter: by junior/lead/senior pay grades).
That data will be published in the Develop out next week - and the data should go online at the same time too.
The £32k figure is really just a topline number we teased in MCV to compare to the overall UK industry (incl. retail and publishing) average salary, and those for non-dev disciplines, such as PR and media.
And yes, there are some North/South divide differences in the answers (I've got them here in front of me :)
Good point on smaller companies, though. We didn't ask about that this year but will add it in for 2011.
I remember doing the survey and being surprised that the salary catagories were broken down to ranges of 5k or larger.
Would it not have been better just to have people add a number?
That was mostly so that we could quickly pull the data from Survey Monkey - but noted for next year.
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This would be a more comforting number if it wasn't for the fact that unpaid overtime is a given in many companies. Without crunch working, there would be no games delivered because simple stuff like honest scheduling and honesty with publishers appears beyond the ken of many producers. Crunch working and expected-by-the-company-or-don't-you-want-to-work-here (i.e. forced) unpaid overtime makes salary figures meaningless, as the hourly rate paid dips towards little better than minimum wage...
