By Catrin Jones on 24 Mar 2021, Skillsearch - Website
Welcome to this year’s Games and Interactive industry’s Salary and Satisfaction survey results!
Each year we gather information from people in the games industry across a range of topics: salaries, benefits, remote work, priorities, and much more. This year with covid and everyone moving to working remotely where we can, it is more interesting than ever to see what’s happening across the industry.
If you’ve read our survey before you’ll notice a few differences this year - but after the year that was 2020, that’s hopefully not too surprising! The big new addition is of course the coronavirus section (pages 4-5 of the full document) that shows people’s views and experiences of covid from within the games industry.
Another thing I wanted to address here is why we chose to split Europe into the two sections: North & West Europe, and South & East Europe. We had a good number of participants from Europe as a whole, we wouldn’t have been able to do a full breakdown on each area individually without compromising the anonymity of the results in some areas. When working through the data we found that this division made the most sense as there was a lot of similarities between North/West and South/East in salaries and general outlooks.
If you have any questions about areas that we touch on in the document, then we’d love to hear from you. We will be producing follow up pieces in our ‘Games Industry Guide’ series so the more requests we have for different areas, the more likely it’ll be that your topic will get brought to the top of the list! The quickest way to do this is to tweet us using #SkillsearchSurvey2021 and we will keep track of requests through there.
Alternatively if you have some data that you or your company would like about a specific company or job title then please get in touch and we’ll be able to produce a personalised document for you.
Thank you again to everyone that got involved with the responses and we hope you enjoy this year’s results!
UK Games and Interactive Salary and Satisfaction Overview
View the full report to look further into UK salary and satisfaction data including…
- Large companies (100+ people) look likely to have the lowest amount of remote work offered post covid – with an average amount of 54% of time to work remotely.
- Company funded training is the benefit that had the biggest increase from 2019 with 42% now saying it is one of their top three benefits to receive.
- Average salaries for women in the UK games industry slightly overtook their male counterparts in junior and mid-level roles for the first time, although they are still significantly behind in more senior positions.
Northern and Western Europe Games and Interactive Salary and Satisfaction Overview
View the full report to look further into Northern and Western Europe salary and satisfaction data including…
- The percentage of people actively looking for a job varies across countries in the North and West of Europe. In Nordic countries only 17% of people will definitely be job hunting, but in France 36% so over a third will be.
- Producers have the biggest salary jump when moving from Senior to Lead level, with an average €16,000 increase between these job titles.
- 1 in 10 people have said that the company culture and which projects that they’re working on have become less important to them over 2020. Matched with 51% saying work/life balance is more important this may see a big shift in priorities across the industry.
Southern and Eastern Europe Games and Interactive Salary and Satisfaction Overview
View the full report to look further into Southern and Eastern Europe salary and satisfaction data including…
- Globally, most people chose to turn down job offers to stay and finish their current project, but in Southern and Eastern Europe a close second place was based on salary – 18% of job offers were turned down because the salary offered wasn’t as high as they were expecting
- The proportion of people looking to change jobs in 2021 varied hugely depending on how long the person has been at their current company. Everyone who had been at their company less than a year said that they would either definitely or potentially look to change jobs this year.
- Average female salaries were lower than their male counterparts across all seniority levels, with this gap increasing as seniority grew. The average (yearly, gross) lead salary for men is €44,000 and for women it’s €33,000.
Global Games and Interactive Salary and Satisfaction Overview
View the full report to look further into global salary and satisfaction data including…
- Canada’s games industry expects to have the most remote work available to them after covid with an average of 67% of time worked remotely.
- Eastern Europe has the biggest gap between average salaries for men and women, with female salaries 28% lower
- People making console games in Eastern Europe and Canada had the highest salaries, but people making mobile games had higher average salaries in the US, Northern Europe, Western Europe, UK and Southern Europe.
Programmers Games and Interactive Salary and Satisfaction Overview
View the full report to look further into programmer salary and satisfaction data including…
- 40% of programmers using an In-House engine would like to try working with a different engine if they could
- Programmers that have been at their current company 1-2 years are most likely to be looking for a job with 1 in 4 saying they will be job hunting in 2021
- If all programmers were given a chance to move into another area of programming, gameplay programming was the most popular choice
Artists Games and Interactive Salary and Satisfaction Overview
View the full report to look further into artist salary and satisfaction data including…
- Salaries were higher on average for people using Maya instead of 3DS Max, although people able to use both professionally earned more than people who have only used one.
- Artists earn more across all seniority levels when working on mobile games
- Technical Artists earn most compared to other types of artists in the games industry, although at Senior and Lead level VFX artists match or exceed the Tech Art salary levels.
Finally
A reminder that if you have any burning questions or would like to know more about a specific area, piece of data, or sample size please get in touch, we're happy to help answer your questions!
Thank you for reading we look forward to hearing your thoughts on Twitter and LinkedIn. Join the conversation with #SkillsearchSurvey2021
Check out the Skillsearch website here.