I've noticed that people in the game industry make significantly less than other software engineers. Why do you think that is? The few software engineers that I know who work the hours that are the norm in the game industry make even more. I wonder what market forces are at work here.
I see comments like this a lot on HN, and I think the difference is exaggerated. Yes, engineers make more outside of the game industry, but if you look at average salaries for engineers it's not that much lower. That $84K number includes, artists, designers, QA and producers. The average salary in the US for game industry software engineers was $91K in 2013 (http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10567).
According to sources that come up in Google (bureau of labor, indeed, glassdoor, salary.com) the average nation wide software engineer salary is close to that plus or minus $5K.
On HN it feels like nation wide game industry numbers are being compared to the salaries of the best engineers at the most successful Silicon Valley\SF tech companies. When you compare against top tier companies we're looking at a $20K+ jump. But if you start comparing against top tier game developers like Valve, Riot or Naughty Dog you get comparable results.
I know that salary surveys are understandably taken with a grain of salt on HN, but I feel like it's a better yardstick than the "common wisdom" that gets thrown around.
A lot of the engineers making games don't want to do anything else. They're willing to accept a lower rate of pay to stay in the industry. When they look for other opportunities, they're usually just moving from one games company to another. Since there a lot less games companies than there are companies that employee engineers in general, there is less competition and less pressure to pay the same rates as engineers may make at companies like Google or Apple.
It's "fun". Working for sports teams is the same way. I just had an NBA team looking for someone capable of doing very nontrivial development in areas that border on computer vision and machine learning for $40K a year. (They ended up hiring a--as in, one--fresh college grad for the position. I look forward to seeing what they can come up with.)
There are probably about 50 profitable AAA game studios in the whole world. These pay quite well[1]. But there are just few hundred engineers working in all of them. The rest of the industry is either a new studio building up its team while working on low profit titles or an old studio circling the drain. These cannot pay well. People work there either to get experience and advance into one of AAA teams or are hoping their own studio will become a AAA itself.
There are quite a few people who want to work on games, true. But I am not so sure the pool of talented engineers that are very good at the tasks game development poses is much larger than anywhere else in industry.
On the other hand, I don't think a very large portion of game development teams are engineers anymore. Not only are the tools much better, there is much more focus on other things like art, sound, marketing, design, etc...
Two years ago I had a conversation with a recruiter who was working with a company trying to build out a games-testing shop in Portland. They were offering people with 7-10 years experience $35/hr, and seemed shocked when I told them how low that was compared to previous non-games testing jobs I had held previously.
It's a good point that the proportion of employees who are engineers is probably lower than in the past. I wonder how engineering vs art/music salaries compare.
Economics 101. When a job has a halo effect, people will crowd into it until they bid down salary and working conditions to the point where they would be better off working at McDonald's.
It depends. Where I work, C#/Unity3d developer costs about 1,5-2 of a normal C# developer, although they do very similar things and have an equal technical level.
