Gamasutra Salary Survey

Elyaradine

http://www.gamasutra.com/salarysurvey2014.pdf

I seldom really look at these surveys, as I don't usually find much value in them (in particular, they don't seem to publish variance, and I believe these numbers vary hugely). But something that's been popping up in my feeds lately is how at the bottom of page 6, the average salaries of those with only a high school education are higher than those with any further education; and programmers with "some" college degree have higher salaries on average than those of any further education. I found that quite surprising.

EvanGreenwood

I found it curious that European respondents earned so much less than their US counterparts. About half as much.

There were 573 European respondents, 292 Canadians, and 1246 US respondents. Which is a fair number from which get results, but still the education-vs-salary values did seem noisy/unpredictable. If that really is the trend I'd like some more insight into it before I come to conclusions...

(Like for example, the highest paid artists might be the oldest artists, and maybe the formal education for them was more limited when they would have studied, so maybe they fall heavier into the just high-school bracket. The graphs didn't account for any other factors than education and salary so it's impossible to guess)

Also, 57% of the indies they received data from made less than $500 in game sales. It's not that surprising, but it's a pretty grim statistic. Of course, I'm not sure why 28% of the indie developers collected were in "QA".

AngryMoose

Another thing that they don't ever report is a location breakdown. Salaries in a city like LA can easily be 50% or higher than the same candidate can earn in a place like Austin or Raleigh, solely due to offsets for cost of living rates.

kidult

Yeah the cost of living factor is very interesting, especially for the Europeans. Their salaries are lower and the cost of living higher than most U.S. counterparts.