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Japanese company will pay part of workers' salaries in Bitcoin
Employees at a Japanese firm will soon be able to receive part of their salary in Bitcoin, if they're feeling brave enough. GMO Internet, which offers a range of web-related services including a Bitcoin exchange, will pay workers up to 100,000 yen (about $890) starting in February. "Employees can receive salaries by Bitcoin if they want," a company spokesperson said. "We hope to improve our own literacy of virtual currency by actually using it."
Lawsuit outs West and Zampella's salaries, bonuses at Infinity Ward: Projected $13M bonus in 2010
Former Infinity Ward studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella had projected salaries of $420,000 in 2009, with projected bonuses of more than $3 million each, emails between Activision bosses in 2009 show.The spreadsheet lists the expected salaries of the top 20 Infinity Ward employees in 2009 and 2010. The 18 remaining employees -- the bulk including software engineers and game designers -- had projected salaries between $71,500 and $173,000. The seven employees under West and Zampella each expected a bonus of $603,000, while staffers seeing the lowest percentage of the bonus pool (1.5 percent) had a projected $278,000.In 2010, the year Activision fired West and Zampella, they were each expected to earn $437,000, with projected bonuses of $13 million each. The rest of the top 20's projected salaries and bonuses rose accordingly, with salaries between $74,000 and $180,000, and bonuses ranging from $1.4 million to $2.5 million."If you recently worked on a hit FPS, read this and see how incredibly underpaid you are," ngmoco general manager Benjamin Cousins tweeted about the documents.The emails were released into public record in the lawsuit between the Infinity Ward Employee Group and Activision; West and Zampella sued Activision in 2010 claiming they were owed $36 million in royalties associated with Modern Warfare 2, after Activision fired them earlier that year. West and Zampella now claim $1 billion in damages and the case is set for trial May 29.
2011's game industry salary stats push us once more toward business school
With this week's annual release of Game Developer Magazine's "Game Industry Salary Survey Results," we're once again reminded that game industry professionals – on average – make kind of a lot of money. How does approximately $81,192 per year sound to you? Sounds pretty damn good to us as well, and that's the average take home for people across a variety of disciplines: business/legal, programming, production, sound/art/video, design, writing, and QA. Despite the survey having existed for 11 years now, it still doesn't include the press (though you can tell from our cushy leather chairs that we're clearly doing all right).But who is making the biggest bucks, you ask? Unsurprisingly, the "business/legal" category brings home the most dough on average, pulling in approximately $102,160 annually. Similarly unsurprising, QA testers pick up the bottom end of the scale, earning around $47,910 on average. Salaries on both the high and low end dropped a bit compared with last year's survey, but not by much more than the 2.4 percent margin of error.The survey's data was once again culled from respondents across the game industry in North America, the UK, and the EU, as well as a sizable chunk of indies/independent contractors (though the salary averages are pulled specifically from US-only data). Outliers – folks making dramatically more or less than the average – were removed from results before averaging "to prevent them from unnaturally skewing the averages." That sounds like another good reason not to include game journo salaries!
MCV 2012 UK salary survey shows industry pay up 10 percent year over year
MCV's 2012 UK Games Industry Salary Survey, which polled 975 people (597 of whom worked in United Kingdom), showed an average UK games industry salary of £33,123 ($50,741), more than a 10 percent increase from 2011's average of £30,667 ($46,979). That figure was created using survey results from "all sectors - development, publishing, retail, PR & marketing, services, technology and business development," according to MCV. Ten percent of respondents were women, which is reportedly in-scale with their overall presence in the British gaming industry. The study's average salary figure is a median average rather than a mean average, we should note, and does not include "the group of very senior, and very well paid, execs" that also participated in the survey. Including their data, the average salary is £35,790. If you include the 378 non-British respondents, the average rose to £34,263, indicating that junior-level employees may be earning more outside of the UK. The survey also showed a disparity between the average salaries of men and women, with industry women making £1.35 an hour less than their male counterparts. This is disproportionate to MCV's global findings, which show that women in the games industry earn more than men on average, albeit only by a few hundred pounds. Here is your reward for making it all the way through a facts-oriented article about salaries and averages. [mffoto via Shutterstock]
Rumor: Japanese game programmers report low salaries
[Chris Gladis] It would be, like, totally glamorous and exciting to be a programmer for a game company in Japan, right? Maybe not so much. According to anonymous responders on Japanese super-forum 2ch (as translated by CNNGo), salaries for game programmers are far below what you'd expect for a tech job in one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in. "¥130,000 [$1,457] for 256 hours of work a month," one poster reports. "¥160,000 [$1,793] and I am ready to die," another laments. "I can't even afford the 'recruit suit' I'll need for interviewing for another job." How do you live in Tokyo on that kind of scratch? "¥180,000 [$2,017] a month, no bonus, and only thanks to the company dorm can I afford to live in Tokyo," one responder explains. It seems that game development is considerably less prestigious than other fields. "I'm 27, live in Tokyo, working for a major company, and make ¥680,000 [$7,622] a month, with a separate yearly bonus," one anonymous poster boasts. "But it isn't in the game industry. Ha!" The moral of this story is this: Don't work for a game company in Japan. [Via Kotaku]
Apple losing engineers due to low salaries? Not so fast
A post on Slashdot by Oren Hurvitz yesterday highlights a Glassdoor analysis, claiming engineers at Apple have significantly lower annual salaries than their Silicon Valley (and Redmond) peers: Apple: $89,000 Yahoo!: $105,375 Microsoft: $105,642 Google: $112,573 The post asks, "Will Apple have to raise salaries to match the market rate, or face defections?" Cnet's Matt Asay says, essentially, "nah." Apple's high stock price and options benefits are likely a reason many engineers are staying. Plus, he asks, "where are these developers going to go?" The coming [staying? already-here? -- ed.] recession and a sagging employment market aren't going to make it easy for engineers to find higher-paid jobs elsewhere in the Valley. On the other hand, Hurvitz notes on his blog that when squared with the company's net income, Apple's engineers are getting the short end of the stick, since their low salaries made a large difference in Apple's bottom line. Even so, Asay says, "Apple has time to figure this out and may not need to do anything."
