How much are Unreal specialists willing to pay in Russia?

Participated in the work on the article:

• App2Top.ru — information resource about the video game business;
• UE4 Daily is a platform of the Russian—speaking community of developers on Unreal Engine;
• Spice IT — recruitment agency;
• Talents In Games is a job search site in the gaming industry.

Note: some of the heroes of the material expressed their personal expert point of view, which may not be related or coincide with the position of the employer.

Tectonic shift

Unreal Engine is not yet the most common video game development tool in Russia. The demand for Unity specialists in the country is now 5-8 times higher. This is easily explained by the specifics of the domestic market. Most of our development is focused on mobile, where Unity occupies a dominant position.

However, now the landscape of Russian development is undergoing a tectonic shift. There are more and more gaming teams that see consoles and PCs as their platform, among other things.

King’s Bounty II (developer — 1C Entertainment, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

There are many reasons for this phenomenon. Among the main ones are the following:

• An increase in the labor market and the number of professionals in it as a whole. The latter would not have been possible without the stable success of Russian mobile studios on the world market. Success led to an increase in the number of teams. More personnel means more turnover, which means more people from companies that decide to launch their own gaming business, including those related to consoles and PCs.
• The emergence of large-scale local companies interested in increasing the number of sales channels and risk diversification. In other words, having achieved success within their niche, mobile majors from Russia are now interested in expanding their audience, entering new markets and platforms.
• Continued lowering of the threshold for entry into game development. We are talking about almost equal access to development tools and documentation for high-class professionals and schoolchildren.
• High interest of investors (including non-target ones) in the gaming market. Although it remains high-risk, business angels are still willing to invest. Including games for consoles and PC.

Along with the growth in the number of teams looking less at mobile, interest in Unreal Engine is also growing, which first of all has established itself as an AAA toolkit for “large platforms”.

Why do developers turn specifically to Unreal Engine?

What is the reason for the interest in the engine, the developers explain in different ways. Often, the description of its advantages depends on both the specific team and the project it is working on.

Sperasoft programmers highlight open source code among the main advantages: “Unreal Engine has open AAA—level tools. This means that [we] have a chance to meet the same engine in other projects. The chance is especially great when working with companies that do not have their own solution.” The latter is an obvious advantage for Sperasoft, which specializes in outsourcing.

Partisans 1941 (developer — Alter Games, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

A completely different plus is highlighted by the leading developer Pixonic (Mail.Ru Group) Alexander Blintsov. According to him, the engine has a low entry threshold: “It allows you to make a game even for those who have not dealt with programming languages before, thanks to the presence of a visual programming function (blueprints) and everything necessary for development out of the box.”

Kirill Shabordin, technical director of Ambi.Games, agrees with him: “Unreal Engine has a better learning curve than Unity […] A game designer with knowledge of a couple of scripts can independently assemble mechanics on the engine without working with code.”

He also notes another positive side of the engine: “To get a modern picture on the Unreal Engine, less time is spent than on Unity […] A few years ago, Black Desert Online was the main graphic reference. With Unity, even trying to do something like this on a smartphone would take a year. Unreal Engine, in turn, allows you to quickly implement the same level of graphics in the game.”

But Shabordin also highlights important disadvantages when working with the tool. One of them is a strong tie to standard game mechanics. “As soon as you go beyond what the engine provides by default, you have to really dive into the Unreal Engine.” The second disadvantage is the presence of optimization problems: “The engine has difficulties when working with smartphones and weak computers.”

However, Roman Goroshkin, who is responsible for the promotion of Unreal Engine in Russia and the CIS, does not agree with the latter. According to him, the shortcomings in the performance of the engine on mobile are nothing more than prejudices.

Atomic Heart (developer — Mundfish, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

Head of the Allods Team Studio (Mail.Ru Group) Alexander Prokhorov, speaking about Unreal Engine, does not mention the problems, but makes it clear that he expects improvements in the resource system of the engine. The rest of the tools from Epic Games completely suits him. “It is stable, functional, has an excellent renderer, network layer, tools; its code is convenient to expand, there is also a convenient framework for prototyping and high-level logic that non—programmers (blueprints) can use,” Prokhorov explains the Allods Team’s decision to use Unreal Engine for all new studio projects.

Marketing and business development also play an important role in popularizing the engine, according to Epic Games directly. The company regularly arranges show cases of third-party games at specialized conferences, helps with the launch of educational initiatives.

“We also help teams in solving business issues, show their projects to publishers, investors, and the media,” says Goroshkin, who has been promoting the engine on the domestic market for more than two years.

Who in Russia works on Unreal Engine?

Epic Games does not disclose the specific number of teams seriously engaged in Unreal Engine development in Russia. According to our estimate, we can even talk about a hundred teams or more. Mostly indie. Among the most notable:

• Mundfish and one of the most notable games in the international arena from Russia — Atomic Heart;
• Sobaka Studio, preparing for the release of 9 Monkeys Of Shaolin;
• Alter Games, which is working on Partisans 1941;
• Dynamic Pixels, which continues to develop Hello Neighbor.

The engine also has major partners in the region. From the majors, in addition to the already mentioned Sperasoft and Mail.Ru Group, the toolkit is actively used, for example, Saber Interactive.

According to Yulia Egorova, HR director of the company, Saber was joined some time ago by a team that has been working with the engine for several years. And now in St. Petersburg, a project is being developed on Unreal Engine.

9 Monkeys Of Shaolin (developer — Sobaka Studio, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

As far as we know, Social Quantum has been working with the engine for about four years. Judging by the company’s activity on the labor exchange, it has not lost interest in him today. At the moment, the authors of the Megapolis mobile builder are recruiting a large number of new employees who are guided by the tool.

1C Online Games also works closely with Unreal Engine. The company currently has two projects in development on the engine — a multiplatform King’s Bounty II (PS4, Xbox One, PC) and a client-side unannounced MMO for PC.

By the way, the techlid Pushkin Studio (Mail.Ru Group) Vladimir Alyamkin noted that there is a very great interest in the engine among the teams engaged in VR and AR games.

Problems of the Unreal specialists’ labor market

The main conclusion that you make when you get acquainted with the opinion of experts: the domestic Unreal market as a whole is very much in need of employees.

“First of all, programmers are needed,” says Alexander Blintsov, the lead developer of Pixonic. And immediately notes that other pros are also needed: “… and 3D artists, and 2D artists, and UX/UI designers, and game designers.”

The same is said by Asya Orlova, Lead Gameplay Designer at District Zero VR: “Now within the Unreal Engine, in addition to developers, there is a demand for VFX artists, level designers, lighting artists, environment artists, character artists, sound designers, testers. There is also a huge demand for gameplay designers.”

However, she makes an important point: the market needs good specialists. There is no shortage of offers.

Hello Neighbor (developer — Dynamic Pixels, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

Konstantin Zhukov, CTO at Sargos Games, agrees with Blintsov and Orlova: “There is a serious personnel shortage in the industry, there are not enough qualified specialists [for Unreal Engine] in all directions.”

“If we take Middle/Senior level specialists, those who have been working with the engine for at least 3-4 years, then their number in Russia is less than a hundred people,” says Peter Leontiev, Generalist Programmer at 1C Online Games.

Yulia Egorova from Saber Interactive says it milder. According to her, “it is not easy to find professionals in any business.” At the same time, she also shares that many people are familiar with Unreal Engine today, but “we don’t have enough of their technical base for the project.”

Blintsov sees the reason for such a problem in two aspects. First: Unreal Engine 4 is a relatively young engine, the specialists for which simply did not have time to appear in Russia. The second aspect: the orientation of the domestic game developer already mentioned at the beginning of the article to mobile, where the engine has proven itself quite recently — with the releases of Fortnite and PUBG.

Gripper (developer — OctoBox Interactive, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

Kirill Shabordin from Ambi.Games has a different view on the problems of the labor market. He believes that it is difficult to find specialists on the market, not because there are few of them, but because studios often do not understand what type of professionals they need to work with the Epic Games toolkit.

“You don’t need specialists, but people of a very broad profile. People with a smeared skill. In Unreal Engine, it is very important that a person can learn a little programming and understand a little game design,” says Shabordin.

His position is confirmed by Leontiev: “There is now a great demand in the industry for generalists, people who can do everything about the technical component of the project: gameplay, graphics, tools, optimization, pipelines.”

Leontiev explains such a request by the fact that such universal specialists are convenient from a business point of view: you can save on the size of the team, on salary.

Shabrodin also believes that one of the most sought-after professions in the Unreal specialists market right now is a game designer who works freely with Blueprints functionality. At the same time, in his opinion, it is not worth hiring good programmers to develop a game on the Epic Games engine.

In part, his position is explained by Yulia Egorova from Saber Interactive. Speaking about the difficulties of finding engine specialists, she notes that “specialists with deeper knowledge and development experience are interested in lower-level tasks, and working on a ready-made engine is less attractive for them.”

On Air (developer — RainStyle production, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

Another problem that can be encountered in the market of engine specialists is the psychological effect when a person begins to consider the first object of a new area as the best, even if it does not correspond to reality.

“There are cases when a smart guy is engaged in Unreal Engine, thinks he is a cool specialist, because he has been in his company for a long time and occupies a high position (for example, Senior or even technical director), but in fact, at best, he turns out to be an ordinary Middle with problems in the engine part. This happens because in modern game development, you need to develop every day and look beyond your work tasks, and not use exclusively old techniques,” Vladimir Alyamkin from Pushkin Studio reveals the concept.

How much are Unreal specialists willing to pay?

Private assessments

A difficult situation has developed in the Russian labor market. Despite the relatively small number of teams engaged in the production of Unreal projects, there is an acute shortage of highly qualified specialists.

Judging by private expert estimates, as a result, Unreal developers’ salaries are slightly higher on average in the market today than those of other game developers.

Not all companies put up with this. According to Peter Leontiev from 1C Online Games, “there is often a discrepancy between the expectations of the candidate and the salary company: the latter are looking for a Senior-level specialist for food.”

Frozen Flame (developer — Magisterion, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

Why such a scenario often bears fruit, explains Asya Orlova from District Zero VR: “The Russian game dev is generally alive partly only because there are a lot of introverts who underestimate themselves. We really have a lot of ideological enthusiasts who work more for an idea, not for money. The ratio of ideologically and financially motivated, in my opinion, is 70 to 30.”

So, like any other salary, the remuneration of Unreal specialists depends heavily on the place.

“In one company, an ordinary developer [here we are talking about programmers. — Editor’s note.] can receive 150-200 thousand rubles (~ $ 2400-3000), and in another company a top specialist — no more than 100 thousand (~ $ 1500). Moreover, if the company is large, it does not mean that it pays more. The highest salary of an Unreal specialist in a non-managerial position from those that I have met in open sources is 250 thousand rubles per month (~$4000),” says Alexander Blintsov from Pixonic, who did his first project in an indie studio on Unreal Engine 4 for 65 thousand per month (~$1000).

Leontiev believes that the starting salary of an Unreal specialist [again, we are talking about programmers – Ed.] without experience in game development is higher today — from 80 thousand rubles (~ $ 1300). But this is only on condition that the potential employee has something to show in the portfolio. Leontiev himself, according to him, was gaining starting experience in an indie team, where he was not paid at all.

Be:Brave (developer — One Dream, engine — Unreal Engine 4)

There is no point in discussing junior salaries at all, Kirill Shabordin believes: “This is always a story about what we agreed on. Usually Junior is people who are willing to work for food, they say, the main thing is to teach me.”

As for mid-level specialists, according to Shabrodin, salary expectations can be distributed as follows:

• artist — from 120 thousand rubles (~$1900);
• programmer — from 150 thousand rubles (~$2400);
• game designer — also from 150 thousand rubles (~ $ 2400).

Moreover, Orlova agrees with the latter assessment: “The approximate salary fork for a gameplay designer working on Unreal Engine is 150-250 thousand rubles (~$2400-4000).” However, she speaks of such figures as the maximum, not the average for the market.

The representative of Sperasoft, speaking about the average salaries of Unreal designers in the market, was a little more cautious in his estimates. In his opinion, Middle can count on a salary of 140 thousand rubles (~ $ 2200), and Senior — at the level of 180 thousand rubles (~ $ 2800). He also noted that Junior designers on the market receive an average of 110 thousand rubles (~$ 1,700).

Research assessment

Spice IT recruitment agency also conducted its own analysis of the Unreal specialists market. His results differ from private estimates in a smaller way.

The data was collected as a result of communication with active Unreal Engine candidates in Russia as a whole, and not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Conclusion

The non—massive nature of the demand for Unreal specialists is primarily due to the relatively small number of studios in Russia that work on it (few studios – few requests).

But now the number of such studios, including among the majors, is growing. And the more they become, the more obvious will be the shortage of professionals in this profile, which is already experienced by companies that have switched to the engine.

The shortage of personnel today spurs the level of wages, which, according to some experts, even for middle-level specialists can start from 150 thousand rubles (~ $ 2,400).

At the same time, as we see it, the situation should level out in the next couple of years. Indie developers are interested in the engine, often engaged in games as a hobby. It is they who, in two or three years, will be able to become the mid-level link in which majors engaged in large-scale development are so interested.