survey-results
Latest
MechWarrior Online showcases new Frozen City environment in video
Piranha Games showcased its first video dev diary for MechWarrior Online just yesterday, but that isn't stopping the company from offering more peeks at its upcoming free-to-play game. Today the studio revealed the newest environment for mech battle fans: the Frozen City. This new area offers some special advantages and disadvantages. One benefit of the cold is that mechs will take longer to overheat, but ice also causes a loss of traction. The dynamic, unpredictable weather will affect visibility and force players to rely on teammates. MechWarrior Online also released the results for its most popular commander names survey; Wolf beat out all other names with nearly double the registered names (20.5%) as next closest competitor, Cat. Why is the name so popular? Some theorize that there's a historical connection to the Wolf's Dragoons elite mercenary force, which was introduced in the first edition of the original board game. Take a look at the Frozen City in the video after the cut and head over to the official forums to check out what other pilot names people are picking. [Source: MechWarrior Online press release]
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!
