#developer salaries

I've said that the cost of employing an average mid-level developer is usually estimated at approximately $10,000 USD per month. This doesn't mean all developers cost the same amount. There are two major determining factors for compensation in the game industry - discipline and experience level. Regardless of discipline, a developer gets a pay band commensurate with her experience level. The more experienced, the higher the pay.

The various disciplines also command different pay bands. Generally, programmers are the most highly paid developers as a group. Their skills are in high demand across multiple industries. Producers run the broadest range based on experience - entry level producers are paid very little, while executive producer usually has the highest pay on the dev team. Designers and artists are paid less than programmers, but more than QA as a general rule. The lowest paid discipline is usually QA. The more technical or difficult the role is to hire for, the higher the base pay tends to be.

This would mean that, for example, a mid-level programmer that wanted to become a mid-level designer would likely need to accept a pay cut because the salary band for designers is lower than the salary band for programmers. Going from QA to a programmer role would come with a significant pay increase. And so on and so forth.

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For those who aren’t aware, [Ubisoft is offering pay increases for their Canadian studio employees] starting at 5% for junior positions and scaling all the way up to 20% for senior developers. If you look at this decision alone in a vacuum, paying people off rather than actually change the problematic parts seems like an attempt at buying silence. Honestly, without inside information as to what is going on at the higher levels of Ubi leadership, that very well might be the case. From a more clinical and dispassionate perspective, however, this also makes some amount of sense if this decision is not the only effort being made to clean house.

[Ubisoft acknowledged back in July] that they are at high risk of losing talent due to the abuse allegations. I suspect they have had a lot of employee turnover in recent months. They have also likely seen the employee retention issues that Activision-Blizzard is currently having as well - there’s a lot of chatter in industry channels about the developers leaving Activision-Blizzard these days - and if my inbox is to be believed, hiring in general is difficult right now due to the number of companies competing for talent. Ubisoft leadership probably sees a major need to retain their most experienced and knowledgeable employees, especially if there are signs that employee turnover (especially among senior devs) is rising unacceptably high. They recognize the risk and need to do something to try to reduce the attrition rate. What do you think the best course of action would be in order to try to persuade your employees to stay? I would argue that higher pay is probably the most effective option available.

Furthermore, we must realize that any kind of systemic changes to fix the problems and working environment will take time to prove out. “Talk is cheap”, as the saying goes. Ubisoft leadership has promised to take steps to fix things but even if they are telling the truth, the company could suffer significant long-term damage from losing too many of their senior developers on their biggest franchises while they prove that they have truly fixed things. Without enough developers continuing to produce their product line, their ability to change things for the better will be significantly hindered.

Hypothetically, the best way to keep workers around while they prove that they have actually changed for the better is by putting their money where their mouth is, by offering more money to stay. I cannot definitively say whether this is the truth or not - it could very well be a cold-hearted attempt at buying off their developers’ consciences. However, I would contend that it is also really the best way to try to prove that they are serious about fixing things. I don’t think Ubisoft has any options in this situation that will look good, only options that will look less bad. This course of action is probably the best of the options that were available to them. If I were thinking about leaving Ubisoft, a significant pay increase is probably the most compelling thing they could offer me in order to persuade me to see if the rest of their promises of change are legit or not. 

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Absolutely. My very first job as a junior dev paid $42,500 annually, way back in the early 2000s. Today I'm earning approximately $110,000 per year as a senior dev. Obviously, my salary has climbed along the way depending on factors like experience level, employer, the location of the studio (e.g. jobs in California or New York City tend to pay more due to higher cost of living), project budget, and so on. In my experience, salary increases have come from two primary sources: changing jobs and raises.

Changing jobs is the way to get the biggest pay bumps. My first job (as a junior programmer) paid $42,500 a year. My second job was as an hourly contractor (as a mid-level scripter) and paid $35 an hour, the equivalent of nearly $73,000 annually (not including benefits, since it was a contract job). As you can see, there was a pretty hefty increase in earnings going from junior to mid-level! Going from studio to studio, I would typically see increases of $5-10,000 with each job change if there was no title change. Changing titles was a much bigger bonus - I got a $15,000 pay bump going from mid-level to senior.

Raises tend to be more rare and smaller than salary increases from changing jobs. In my experience, getting a raise tends to be some percentage of the existing salary. While I was working for EA, for example, I could typically expect a 3-5% raise each year provided that the company did well financially. When I started at EA, I was paid at around $75,000 and left at just shy of $90,000 a few years later. I would get a pay raise of around $2,000-5,000 per year while I was there. That said, not every employer has an annual raise structure like EA. At my current employer, I only seem to pick up a raise every other year (though there are other benefits to working here aside from salary that are keeping me from seeking employment elsewhere).

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The difference in pay is sizable. Let me put this into perspective. One senior software engineer I worked with left the games industry to take a senior software engineer job at a casino games company in Chicago. I believe his new salary at that casino games company was $300,000 per year. A few years later, another programmer I know was offered $140,000 for a senior software engineer position at a game studio in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. 

If you check my [game dev salary survey post] from about a year ago, the $140,000 mark is not abnormal for California - none of the programming Californian survey participants made more than $200,000 a year, even at the lead level. Compare this to non-game programmers working in Silicon Valley or Southern California that easily earn 1.5 times that or more and you get an idea of the difference in compensation.

Generally speaking, benefits tend to be a percentage factor of the cost of employment. Workers who cost a lot to employ tend to get bigger benefits as well - typically as a retention feature, since competitors will try to hire them away and it costs a lot to replace them. Stress-wise, things vary a lot depending on the employer but the game industry is well-known as a whole for crunching to meet deadlines. There are some software development fields that crunch as well, but it isn’t universal.

It’s worth mentioning that there is an anonymous game developer salary survey project. You can see the results for 2020 by [clicking here]

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In my experience, the "base” set of reasons for denying raises tend to be these four:

The manager doesn’t value the employee’s contributions

The manager doesn’t value the employee’s team

The group’s financial numbers aren’t good

Higher Ups want to put the company’s money elsewhere (starting new projects, acquiring other companies, hiring more people, etc.)

This set of reasons then repeats for each level of management above the employee’s manager (i.e. the manager’s manager, the manager’s manager’s manager, and so on) all the way to the top of the organization and the company’s board of directors. 

One publisher I worked for gave all full-time employees annual raises (noted as cost of living increases) each year the company was doing well financially and annual bonuses in addition to that when the individual departments hit their targets. Another employer of mine was less generous and focuses most of its money on acquisitions at the corporate level, giving us pay raises and/or promotions once every two to three years. 

For many of us in the game industry, the best way to get a pay raise is to find a new job elsewhere. That’s actually how I got the majority of my pay raises over my career, and I know I’m not alone.

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It really depends on the size and scope of the project, but the cost (not wage) of $10,000 per month per developer is a pretty reasonable estimate here in the US. Most AAA games in the production phase require dev teams of 100+ people, so you’re looking at a burn rate of at least a million dollars per month. For a team the size of GTA’s (1000+), you’re looking at $10 million per month being spent on employees. Some locations like San Francisco or New York City actually cost even more on average due to the city’s inflated cost of living. $10,000 per month might seem like a lot, but the cost is more than just salary or wages to employ someone. In addition to our salaries, there are many other costs incurred by hiring us.

First off, we have to consider benefits in addition to salary. Here in the states, the employer usually pays for health care, dental, and vision for each employee. Some employers have more esoteric benefits, like snacks and drinks, pet insurance, accidental death and dismemberment insurance, life insurance, counseling, etc. They also have to pay federal and local taxes for each employee. They often also pay to match 401k contributions. These costs often scale directly with the salary of the employee.

The cost of running an office also scales with the number of employees - each worker needs equipment like workstations, dev kits, software licenses, furniture, office supplies, and so on. The number of employees dictates how big an office space you need, which affects the money spent on rent and utilities. The number of employees also affects things like how many kitchens and rec areas there are, office furniture, and so on. It also determines the necessary size of any celebratory activities, such as a launch party. Before the lockdown, I could take a team of ten to a bar and buy them all drinks if I wanted to celebrate something. I can’t take 100+ people to a bar without planning the event with them first or we’ll overwhelm the staff.

Overall, it costs a lot to employ somebody. A large percentage of that cost is obviously paying the wage, but there’s also the taxes and benefits to consider (which all scale off of the wage as well). Beyond that, there’s also the costs of doing work - software licenses, workstations, office space, utilities, and so on. Some employees make more (executives, senior devs, etc.) and some make less (junior devs, contractors) but, when you add it all up, the total costs come out to around $10,000 per month per employee.

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Technical skills can be very valuable for specific design roles, but not for all design roles. For example, programming skill isn’t super useful to a level designer. Understanding of interior design principles, like creating space and how object placement and sight lines affect the viewer’s feelings, is far more valuable to a level designer than programming ability. However, the engineering background can be extremely valuable to other design varieties - engineering math, for example, is very useful to systems designers who spend a lot of time working with formulas for things like power growth curves.

The best fit for someone like you is probably the true Technical Designer role. A technical designer often writes scripts and tools for other designers to enable them to create content, a designer for designers. There’s a good amount of overlap with gameplay programming in this regard, but the technical designer usually spends more time working with designers (e.g. adding support for a new type of effect condition to the effect editor tool) while the gameplay programmer is sometimes tasked with other work that isn’t as design-facing, like building a system to handle switching between PVP and PVE for a game server or inserting the playing of visual effects under specific circumstances in the rendering pipeline.

Unfortunately, not every studio has the need for a technical designer compared to level, systems, narrative, etc. designers. Technical design roles also aren’t usually offered at the junior level. A technical designer role tends to be created when a large design team needs enough dedicated support to justify the cost. Technical designers are usually compensated at about the same level as gameplay programmers (or maybe a little less, if the employer has a codified separate design track advancement structure). Other types of designers that occasionally use technical skills (like systems designers) are usually paid less than technical designers or programmers.

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There’s one hard rule - every game has a budget. Every project has some maximum amount of money and other resources allocated to it that development must generally adhere to. That budget is spent on things like hiring and paying for developers, equipment, software licenses, utilities, rent, etc. The goal of the executives is to get as much as the team can feasibly build out of that budget, given other constraints like ship date and licensing. Pieces of the budget are also earmarked for specific elements too - voice acting, multiplayer, online features, DLC, combat, quests, itemization, etc. all have their own part of the budget because they have to justify their expenditures to accounting.

The overall budget sets a maximum on the number of team members can be on the team because every member of the team has to be paid. This maximum number is the “headcount”. That’s the number of people the team leadership decided is the right number for the team and budget. If we don’t have enough people on the team to reach the headcount, we hire more. If we have more than the headcount, we have to let people go - either layoffs or send them to other projects with an open headcount. But the headcount is the #1 factor in determining total development cost, because paying developers is the largest portion of the total development cost pie by far. A PS4 dev kit might cost $15,000, but that pales in comparison to having to pay a senior engineer $100,000+ per year.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work.

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