Game developer salaries in 2010 tracked, fills us once more with regret
The Game Developer Research group, somehow sensing that we were having a pretty good day, decided to release a portion of its 10th annual, always soul-crushing Game Developer Salary Survey. The information, according to Gamasutra, is fairly optimistic: Traditional mainstream developers are pulling down an average salary of $80,817, a 7 percent increase over last year's average. Indie developers saw a year-to-year increase of around $6,000, bringing their average wages up to $26,780.
Many of the average wages earned by individual disciplines remained equivalent to last year's totals, with some exceptions. Programmers saw their average salaries increased $5,000 over 2009, to a total of $85,733. Producers' average salaries increased almost $13,000 year-to-year, for an average of $88,544. Quality assurance testers saw their average wages get fairly prodigiously bumped from $37,905 in 2009 up to $49,009 in 2010.
And, of course, the whammy: Business and legal employees made an average salary of $106,452, with 85 percent of survey respondents reporting they received additional compensation. If you need us, we'll be over in the corner, questioning our every life decision.
