Ekaterina Bespyatova

How much is paid in the video game industry — developers from the USA and Canada disclose salary data on Twitter

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Last week, the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe started gaining popularity on Twitter again. Under it, gaming specialists from all over the world share their salaries. We chose the most interesting of the tweets.

Image author: Annelise Capossela from Axios
Recall that the first tweets marked #GameDevPaidMe appeared in June 2020.

However, even after a year and a half, the hashtag has not lost its relevance. From time to time, waves of thematic posts begin on Twitter, in which developers tell how much they received in different positions and in different companies. Their goal is to identify inequality and achieve a fair salary for all specialists from the gaming industry.

A new wave of tweets with this hashtag started at the end of last week. It’s hard to say who started it all. But most likely, Michael Effenberger, a game designer at Bungie, was the first (or one of the first) to remember #GameDevPaidMe.

What game experts write

Among those who decided to disclose salary data this time were employees of Bungie, Obsidian Entertainment, Activision Blizzard, Unity, Zynga, Riot Games, Jagex, Jam City, Ubisoft, Moon Studios, Epic Games, Niantic and many other companies. In particular, Josh Sawyer, design director of Obsidian Entertainment, announced his income.

Predictably, the highest salaries turned out to be for specialists working in the USA and Canada (but it’s worth considering that Americans usually indicate a salary before taxes).

For example, an employee of Riot Games, who is in the position of a middle-level producer, noted that only her annual salary is $ 120.2 thousand. In addition, she receives about $30 thousand bonus. Riot Games also pays employees for health insurance and starts a so—called 401(k) account – a funded retirement account.

For comparison, a leading producer from a Mexican studio (she did not write the name of the studio, but it is known that 51-250 people work there) indicated that her salary for the year is $ 29.4 thousand.

It also turned out again that programmers earn the most on average. Judging by the latest tweets, the salary of many of them is kept at the level of $ 100-140 thousand a year, and some of them exceed $ 250 thousand. According to Josh Sawyer, who wrote a small thread about this last summer, this situation is not surprising. Part of the reason is that programmers can always go to non-gaming companies, where they will receive even more.

His words are partially confirmed by Chris Pollock, who works at Demonware on services for Call of Duty. As Pollock noted, now his salary is $155 thousand a year (+15% bonus), but in a traditional tech company he could receive much more.

Testers get much less. For example, a leading tester from Obsidian Entertainment indicated an annual salary of $ 65 thousand, a tester from the French Ubisoft — € 24 thousand ($27.1 thousand), a tester from the British Climax Studios — £18.5 thousand ($24.5 thousand), and a tester from Playground Games — $20 thousand. However, there are also employees whose salaries are quite comparable to the salaries of developers. For example, Michelle Hyde, who works at Xbox, earns $105 thousand a year.

As for artists, their annual salaries on average fluctuate around $ 20-60 thousand. The amount of payments depends on the level, specialization and country. For example, the salary of Noah Bench, a senior technical artist at Niantic, is $143 thousand. While the art director of the Australian Epiphany Games earns about $43.4 thousand a year (including bonuses).

The salary level in a number of companies is influenced by the gender of the employee. As Beth Beinke, director of level design at Zynga, noted, there are a lot of men in the gaming industry whose salary is $ 200-300 thousand a year. At the same time, such a salary is rare for women.

Below are a few more tweets that we found interesting.

 

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