2006 Game Developer Salary Survey Now Available

Gamasutra's annual game developer salary survey will be coming to subscribers of the magazine in the next issue. As always, it looks at the current trends in payment for folks in the games industry, and some of that info is now available online. "According to the new survey, conducted in association with Audience Insights, the average salary in 2006 over all American game programmers was $80,886 - basically flat on the year before, thanks to an influx of entry level coders to the game business, but with significant increases for veteran programmers. The 2006 average for artists was $65,107, again basically flat on 2005, though average salaries of experienced lead artists and animators rose the most. The game designers' average was $61,538, with salaries scaling within a $5,000 range over the last 3 years over all experience levels." The new survey also marks the kickoff of Game Developer Research, a division aimed at doing quantitative analysis of games and gaming trends.

Median and std dev useless

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Mediann and std dev are useless. They only really apply for normal distributions. Salaries tend not to have a normal distribution so they lose their value.

Re:Median and std dev useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for normal distributions, the median is equal to the "average" (the mean).

For non-normal distributions, the median is useful, since it does reduce the effect of outliers at the extreme ends, as someone else mentioned. That's why newspapers usually talk about the median family income of a country, instead of the mean, for example.

Re:Priority?

[GaratNW]

The concept of "game designer" is very obfuscated from an outside perspective. Inside the industry, it can go from "lead designer/creative director", who are very much like project managers, to "Level designer", "ai scripter", "world builder", including tasks like placing hundreds or thousands of creatures, placing furniture, writing quests, simple and complex in whatever tools are available. Again, it covers a huge experience level, and skill set composition. Hence why the salary is shown so low. For every one creative director making $100k or $150k, you have 10 to 20 level designers, script writers, etc making $30k to $50k.

But, speaking as a project manager in the games industry, in response to someone's snarky comment below. A project manager in the games industry that doesn't do anything... doesn't last very long, in my experience. There's not nearly enough money flowing freely through most companies to put up with dead weight. Well, not at most companies anyway. Dead weight, period, usually doesn't last. Or maybe I've just been lucky. :)

Cheers.