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Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

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Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#271

Post by luaKmua »

bilbo0s wrote: post #248
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I haven’t really seen mentioned is that the barrier for entry is high in a lot of video game development. Meaning, I can’t really take 3 of my friends and make the next GTA in my garage. Those type of games need developers, but also artists, writers, actors, etc. They’re expensive, risky operations of which development is only a part of. This is probably why it makes the most sense to treat developers…

Underrated comment. It's even worse when you consider that the engines are generally already made, you only need developers to do what you could almost call glorified scripting compared to engine development. I think Unity and Unreal probably have to pay their devs a reasonable salary. But having devs work in Unity or Unreal to produce a game is not really all that hard. That's kind of the point of Unity and Unreal.

Having done work in a variety of contexts from Game Engine development to working in Unity, what you are describing is only true for the most trivial of projects. Larger projects (especially AAA) have so much customization of the engines and pushing of their boundaries that they require just as much technical expertise as engine development for many of the required tasks.

There are advantages and disadvantages for using these engines. They soften the "getting started" part of game dev for newer people, but for complicated projects it tends to be kicking the can down the road for dealing with deeper issues.

You'd be hard pressed to squeeze good perf out Unity while fully using the HDRP and not understanding the ins and outs of the pipeline.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#272

Post by socialist_coder »

BeetleB wrote: post #252
hn8788 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary isn't the most important part of a job for some people, and saying people in game dev shouldn't have a good salary.

> You should take some personal responsibility and stop blaming your life choices on other people. You should stop jumping to conclusions. Nothing I said indicated I don't take responsibility for that decision. I can choose not to take a job because of crappy pay, but I can still point out why the job has crappy pay (and the reason is not me). > There's also a world of difference between saying that a FAANG salary is…

> I don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary, but I bet I get paid more per hour than most game devs.

If you don't get paid anywhere near FAANG salary then you're probably making the same as what you could make as a game developer...

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#273

Post by ironmagma »

ska wrote: post #264
ironmagma wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation? Even in the Bay Area the median is considered somewhere around $150k.

It's simple; most bay area, like most everywhere, is not FAANG. Treating a non-unimodal distribution as if it were unimodal leads to all sorts of silliness.

I agree. Why compare game developers to FAANG at all? When deciding if it’s worth it, the main thing I want to know is how it stacks up to an average software job.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#274

Post by Mehdi2277 »

mywittyname wrote: post #114
ryandrake wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see this advice a lot, but it's never very specific. "Just negotiate better!" OK, great... how? Most of us have no leverage besides our willingness to walk away, and when the market is saturated with talent, it's usually fine for a company to just let you walk away. I bet for someone who happens to be the world's foremost expert in some niche skill the company needs, negotiating a higher comp is straightforward.…

Pretty much. I had one (out of about ten) company ever offer more from negotiation, and that was only because I had a counter offer from another place. And it was 10%. Every other company has been, "this is our best offer." I'm pretty far from a FAANG uber-dev though.

I've had 3 jobs since college. First one I unintentionally negotiated the internship although did not negotiate the later full time conversion. 2nd/3rd jobs both were negotiated. 2nd job was around 20% increase while 3rd job was 17ish percent. I only had offers from 3 places for the 2nd/3rd job. So 2/3 were successful negotiations. The 17ish percent was also an easy negotiation as I basically just said the current offer number wasn't enough to make me leave my current role and the recruiter immediately jumped to that so they had a 2nd offer ready as a backup. The last company I couldn't get them to budge at all although to there credit they were near the top end of the pay band data I found in levels for the role. The companies were 1 small startup (first one) and then 3 big N type companies. I think startups tend to be negotiation friendly and have poorly defined pay bands anyway. big N is sorta used to them for candidates negotiating with multiple offers (or vs there current role).

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#275

Post by darth_avocado »

darth_avocado wrote: post #27
bluescrn wrote: post #10

The massive gap between UK and US gamedev salaries seems to keep getting larger :(

US cost of living is ridiculous. You shouldn't just compare two numbers one to one. 150k in California is basically just scraping by.

Okay most of the replies I see in here claim here that 150k is a luxurious living are assuming a lot. First and foremost, most these 150k game dev jobs are near big cities, the remote ones at least pre covid never paid that much.

Second, yes after taxes your take home pay per month is ~8k, and a little more if you have dependents. But here's a couple of things to put into perspective:

1. It's not a lot of money if that's your household income and you have kids. Buying a house is nearly impossible with that salary and the average rent for a two bedroom apartment goes 3.5k which also includes a significant commute. Houses are even more expensive to rent. You can definitely get cheaper deals, there's no shortage of shitty housing in California. There's also rent control deals if you never moved out of a house for a decade.

2. A decent employer sponsored health insurance costs about 350 a month for the family.

3. Car payments and insurance on an average are about 400 per month.

4. you put about 500 per month to 401k if you want any decent future savings.

5. Utilities (Internet, water, electricity, gas) comes to about 300 per month

6. That leaves you about 3000 for groceries, gas, medical expenses, school related expenses, recreation, clothing, and bunch of other expenses for say a family of 3-4. That's not a lot of money tbh if you want to save anything at all.

Sure 150k is a great salary if you're fresh out of college and share an apartment with other people. But 150k isn't a starting game dev salary. And it isn't a remote part of CA salary either. This is a salary paid in big cities that are too freakin expensive to stay in.

PS: most of these estimates are conservative, it can easily exceed the cost. For eg, we only have one internet service provider in our area. And if you want the worst plan with bad speed and data caps, you still shell out 80$/month after they finish adding all the bs fees.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#276

Post by olig15 »

vsareto wrote: post #246
gambiting wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually work for a AAA games company and what you said only applies at kind of junior/intermediate level. Hit senior/lead/expert and you can walk out and get another job in a week, it's super hard to hire seniors and above and those positions hold a lot of leverage. Edit: obligatory "above is true in my experience, YMMV"

If there are so many at the junior/intermediate level, shouldn't they be advancing and the senior devs be a larger population? Plus if folks are really sticking to the industry out of passion, they have more of a chance to make it over time. I've heard about game dev's surplus of workers for at least 10 years for almost identical reasons in most of this thread, and that would make nearly anyone a senior for sure, so…

I work in a AAA game company, and see similar to GPs comments. I guess the reason is that so many people also leave the games industry early on (relative to career span). From my experience (In in the programming dpt, at-least), lots of devs just aren't good enough, or want to improve enough to become senior devs.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#277

Post by throwkeep »

> Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe

These are to be taken with a pound of salt. Location, experience, performance, timing, negotiation skills, stock options, etc, make these simplistic salary comparisons highly misleading.

> to encourage pay transparency in their industry.

That's the hook, but these Twitter hashtag campaigns are thinly veiled brag fests. The game devs who push these live in high COL areas, tend to be veterans and want to show the world their 6 figure salary. Which looks incredible to most of their followers. Every time they get these hashtags trending, the "you make that much? you rock!" responses flow in.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#278

Post by Sevii »

thewarrior wrote: post #261
glimshe wrote: post #241

I left the game industry for FAANG and I'm getting paid 2-3x more. I'm happy with this situation if I consider the big picture but, at least in my case, my game job was much, MUCH better than FAANG. No matter how many fancy drinks and energy bars FAANG gives me, if the pay in the game industry was higher I'd have stayed without a doubt. What this means is that FAANG is actually paying what it needs to pay to get empl…

There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ? I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so…

FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out.

Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#279

Post by the_only_law »

darth_avocado wrote: post #275
darth_avocado wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US cost of living is ridiculous. You shouldn't just compare two numbers one to one. 150k in California is basically just scraping by.

Okay most of the replies I see in here claim here that 150k is a luxurious living are assuming a lot. First and foremost, most these 150k game dev jobs are near big cities, the remote ones at least pre covid never paid that much. Second, yes after taxes your take home pay per month is ~8k, and a little more if you have dependents. But here's a couple of things to put into perspective: 1. It's not a lot of money if th…

How do people who aren’t a software developer, doctor, or in a high paying financial sector get buy in CA metros. From what I’ve seen, even other highly technical engineering fields rarely make it to $150k

Re: Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

#280

Post by sgerenser »

jedberg wrote: post #265
bedhead wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fairly normal for certain "glamour" industries. Back in the day when it was relevant, MTV was infamous for paying people almost nothing, for no other reason than they could because MTV had a coolness factor associated with it that people sought. Same is generally true for a lot of the entertainment industry.

Apple still uses that line to underpay people. Their compensation is famously lower than all the other FAANG companies.

Is that really true? Levels.fyi shows Apple right about inline with GOOG, FB and AMZN and significantly higher than MSFT for mid to senior levels.
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