Game developers earn less than other types of developers, by a relatively large margin

According to StackOverflow Developer Survey 2018

 

Am curious about the numbers since in my experience the number the listed for a game Dev is low even for junior positions.

 

It's probably pulled down by indie developers who are just barely scraping by. Fewer people are willing to live on instant ramen to make their dream accounting software.

But it's quite true that programmers can generally earn a lot more in non-game fields and not have to deal with other drawbacks like long crunch periods and bonuses based on metacritic scores. It's an employer's market.

 

I just about spit my coffee laughing at that line Toni. But yeah, I have a feeling that survey takes indies into account and probably even those that aren't full time game devs.

 

Also of note... it defaults to "Global". If you click "United States" in the tab at the top, the numbers are more realistic... but even in the US they'll vary greatly depending on state and metropolitan area.

 

Huh.

I don't remember filling out this survey.

 

Tell that to Notch.

 

my guess is that the numbers are really bloated by the sheer amount of not so successful indie companies and the likes.

 

Statistically, there are probably outliers on both ends of the game dev spectrum. Everything from broke indie to mega hit indies. I don't know how much the game dev numbers are necessarily pulled down by starving indies in this case. For all we know, this survey may have focused on salaried positions. Most starving indies are self employed when doing game dev work.

I definitely would believe overall that software developers outside the game industry make more money in general, especially when comparing salaried positions. Boring backend software development is always worth big money to large corporations, so salaried software developers working on that stuff tend to get paid a very competitive wage.

Generally speaking, game development is more fun than developing banking software, but banks pay software developers better. I thought this was something obvious that everybody already knew.

 

I'm not really sure that AAA/studio games development is more fun than back-end software development. My experience suggests that for software engineers, small to medium start-ups where engineering is highly-regarded and quality of both code and architecture is valued tend to be the more 'fun' environments.

 

@JohnnyA but but but you get to play video games all day long!

 

I've specialized in backend stuff most of my career, and have found it to have more hard problems then almost any other area you can work in. Designing systems for limited environments is hard, but solving for scale is harder.

 

I thought this was common knowledge.

 

True but it's also easiest to become a game developer. With advent of user friendly engines like Unity nobody need to reinvent hot water when they start developing a game. All you need to call yourself a game developer these days is a good idea and the drive and discipline to develop.

Sure your unsuccess will end up as a statistic splatter on the proverbial wall, making game development look like a bad fiscal decision, but at least you're developing something.

Protip.: there are no indie "Engineering managers" or "DevOps specialists" or "Data scientist or machine learning specialist".

 

Its even easier to become a business developer and earn 250-500k USD per year easy

 

Depending on your country.

 

It is much easier to become a front-end web dev.

Back-end development isn't much more difficult either, there're frameworks and library for pretty much everything

 

Which is probably why it's not on the list as the earnings are in the negative

"Front end" and "front end web" are not to be confused.

 

Anyone can call themself whatever they like, but there are very few that actually are good backend developers, I have been in the business for about 20 years, have met so many idiots to be frank It's very seldom I get to be impressed, a bit sad

 

Then what do you mean by "front end web"?

From some reason even expensive websites I've worked on had beginners working on them. It's like people don't do any wetting when hiring web devs.

 

Almost everything is web today so its a bit misleading, but you mean more like public websites right? Not enterprise business systems?

 

Yeah, public websites.

 

I think that Web design agencies (Those that make these kind of systems) are closer to game developers than they are business developers. So the salary is probably closer to a game dev salary too.

 

It's always hard to tell what people mean when they say "web design" since it's often used for different things.
Also what exactly do you mean by "business developers"? What's different between that and what most people call back-end dev?

 

It's someone that works on a enterprise system frontend or backend . But in the enterprise world most Devs are full stack they work both on frontend and backend,maybe not the html though

 

Of course.

And painters and decorators usually earn more than portrait painters.

It's not all about the money.

Spoiler

It's mostly about the money.

 

If it's indie game developers I would expect most of them to earn nothing much at all as a majority. Because that's the reality.

Some indies turn earning not much into earning something decent enough to live off for life, and those guys are going very well in my view. Rarely do you get ones with Ferrari style incomes.

 

I'm going to be disappointed if I won't be able to buy a Ferrari with my first game.

 

And that's kinda OK and not obnoxious

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180213132926.htm

Remember this is calculating the maximum happiness you would obtain from money. They posit that it would not make you happier having more.

 

Don't kid yourselves, this isn't just a matter of a few indie developers pulling down the averages. The majority of game developers earn significantly less than comparable positions in other industries. Most comparable positions in other industries are tech positions. And technical professionals tend to earn well, as the demand for such personnel is usually high. Those positions usually require a higher degree of training and experience. This makes qualified personnel more valuable, and the demand remains high.

In game development, the rabid enthusiasm from younger developers provides employers with their pick of the litter. Game dev employers don't have to face the same limited choices that other tech industries have to deal with. They have a constant source of fresh workers, and the competition for the positions they have on offer gives them a huge amount of leverage when it comes to compensation. Thanks to this, it is easy for them to pay their employees less across the board.

I'm a web developer. I get paid almost twice what game devs in my area get paid, and I only work 8 hours a day, five days a week. There's almost no crunch in my job, ever. I've worked less than 10 hours of overtime in the past year. I work with a lot of the same technologies that game developers utilize, but I get paid way better and have a much higher quality of life. This is a very common situation.

 

Just gotta make $10.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13685

 

But do you enjoy web developing? Was it your dream job as a child to line things up nicely with CSS? Is your creativity limited to making divs with round edges. And putting a gradient on the background. With a nice drop shadow on the titles?

To be fair, its probably a much better quality of life being a web developer. But for some, it would drive them insane.

 

I think it depends on ambition. Ambitious games will kill a developer or ruin their health. That's not fun. And it's not fun making pong either. So the confusing landscape that most indies find themselves in is being trapped between a low poly rock and a buggy place (if we are talking about doing this for money, and we are).

 

Many people enjoy that, but there's far more to it these days. I primarily do web development but am mostly a backend developer, although lately it's been hard to escape angular land. I enjoy it immensely though because for me it's about the problem solving.

 

I myself am is a full-stack developer at a giant IT company in the Bay Area. I finance my game dev hobby out of my paycheck I'm getting to work on these "business systems". Win-win, although in exchange I don't have that much time to develop my games/tools/etc.

 

Okay, for starters, it's getting increasingly clear that a lot of the people here have no idea what actually goes into web design/development. The company I work for develops a full-scale enterprise application. I do my back-end server coding in C#. Full MVC, with data models and server-side controllers in C#. I do full database planning, construction, and management in SQL. I constantly work with GitHub for source control, a necessity for the size of the team we have here. On the front-end of things, our company fully supports AngularJS, one of the newer and more in-demand Google libraries for front-end web application development. I spend a large chunk of every day coding fairly sophisticated object-oriented javascript.

I do also cook up html and css. That just goes with the territory. But my level of experience with both of those languages, as well as my skill at integrating them with Angular, gives me a huge leg up in terms of efficiency. This sort of approach to web development has become common. Most web developers these days are working on data-driven sites with sophisticated templates and scalable visual libraries. The design-related elements have been significantly reduced thanks to the demands of multi-resolution displays perpetuated by the boom in smartphones and tablets. I've accrued an enormous amount of technical skills from my day-job over the past decade and change.

And to answer your original question, yes, I do enjoy it. I don't enjoy it quite as much as I enjoy working on games. But it provides plenty of problem-solving and intellectual stimulation. And thanks to the constant shift toward the technical end of things, I've been able to glean a large number of technical skills from it that I have since applied to my game development.

 

This is always an interesting question. Does one go for the relative drudgery of a stable high paying job, so that one can actually enjoy the time not working? Or does one go for a more interesting day job, but loose some of the ability to enjoy your time not working.

 

Some people insist on the bohemian ideal of suffering for their art. Some abandon their hopes and dreams in favor of maximizing their profitability. And some people compromise, finding a happy medium between the two. I'm trying to aim for somewhere in the middle there, while leaving open the possibility of more art in the future.

 

I think those positions imply some sort or Degree.

No we've never met

I dont think salary estimators can ever be believed. So many spurious factors and who knows, maybe its there to drive wages one way or another.

"I cant live on 20k!".
"Well thats 2k more than the estimator said youd get for your job, feel lucky!"

I think the difference in pay between Game Devs and other kinds is the expectancy of cash flow. Building a system for a company, which they will use from the outset and is essential for them is hugely different to running the Gambling game that is GameDevvin... putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping for a grand payoff at the end. If you've got just 4 devs for a year... well who's got a £100k to spare?? Especially for a project that in all likelyhood is going to fall flat on its face.

Unless you are lucky to be picked up by a Grand, established company, the money just isnt there.

 

You can find interesting problems to solve in almost any industry. The highest paying jobs I've had were always the most interesting also.

The question is what it is you find interesting. I like working on games, but it's because of the number of challenging problems to solve much more then the fact that it's games. If I wasn't able to work on something that pushed some type of boundary or let me consistently try to solve new problems, I'd get bored, regardless of if it was a game or not.

Personally I've never had a problem finding high paying jobs in the game industry. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that I make it a point to be well rounded, I'm a developer not a 'game developer'. And I spent years outside the industry also. Well rounded developers make really good money in games. It's the 'game developers', the people who define themselves as such, that struggle.

 

I won't buy an indie game unless I know that a lot of suffering has gone on.

 

Yeah, me neither, I'm still waiting for the proper "Indie dev markets her/his game on a nail-bed" advertisement...

Let's move out the games from the torture chambers! Let's move the developers in it!

 

Degrees have nothing to do with indie.

 

lol dude... did you misread your own sentence?

You said
"Protip.: there are no indie "Engineering managers" or "DevOps specialists" or "Data scientist or machine learning specialist"."

there are no indie

And I said, yeah they imply degrees.

 

lol dude... did you misread everything so far?
There is no rule that states you can't be indie if you have a degree.

 

lol I think we both playing tennis on different courts. I'm stating that the positions you mentioned must have a degree. Its a requirement and the pay band comes with it. They are Professional Roles. The definition of indie is Not a Professional. You can be Indie with or without a degree, but sure as Shinola, if you have a degree in your field you are only steps away from being a professional and leaving the Indie tag behind. Yes a degree makes a difference, but not on its own.

 

@meat5000 a lot of DevOps guys come from a Sys Admin background where its at least a little less common to have a degree than say your typical developer. Still heavily biased towards a degree, but maybe less so than "Data Scientists" who generally have a undergrad degree and a research based Masters/PhD.

EDIT: I mean in general you are right; although not a must, its overwhelmingly common to have a degree in most of those fields.

EDIT 2: The part about not being indie when you have a degree is a bit off, anecdotally most indies I know started in traditional games development/software development and moved in to indie because they wanted creative freedom (and thus are just as likely to have a degree).

 

No. I deflected your curveball after it hit my field and now you're trying to convince me we're playing volleyball.

Didn't ask. Don't care.

 

Interestingly, I've also observed also a shift to paying top engineers more than their managers. Data here obviously suggests that it hasn't yet become widespread, but it used to be an unwritten rule (and sometimes a written rule) that people couldn't be paid more than their managers*.

- - -

* I mean obviously it has always happened on occasion, but it seems much more common and accepted now, I expect in part due to scarcity and in part due to the engineering culture driven by the valley.

 

Ah fair play, that does put a little spin on it Round my neck of the woods there are very few software qualified people but plenty of coders and indie devs. They all have degrees in completely diferent fields if they have them at all. In fact the most successful Dev/coder I know of near me has no qualifications and was completely self taught! So, yes I do generalise fiercely. There's no set in stone way of things