30% less then America, but then living is 30% cheaper and bankers say if the economy keeps growing as it is at the moment they will be the world leaders by 2030. There is talk that the euro will be governed from Berlin in the near future.
well gemany is cheap working force place.
(some poor working go with 3-6 euros and get paid up by social care.)
so far i know modelers employed by companies go with middle class salaries.. something around 3000 euros. depending on your position and importance of the project. but nummbers are smoke. just see what they pay by hour and what will be in your poked after all taxes and insurances are taken. if you can live with it go ahead. there are some artist comunities in your area. sometimes they work like unions so you can get tips about salaries insurances and other stuff. just look there.
I don't believe for a second that Germany is 30% cheaper to live in than the States. It's nowhere near as expensive as some of the UK, but it is not amazingly cheap either. I expect monthly rent on a decent sized place for one or two persons to be in the region of E600 in somewhere like Berlin, and I'd expect that you'll lose between 1/4 and 1/3rd of your salary in tax before you even see it.
swiss and british bankers running deutsche banks.:poly121:
I think he meant it more like a joke where Germany is almost always under the spotlight with the current issues in EU, kinda like how the Queen is said to rule UK, but lets face it, it's an internal group of assassins that actually does that.
I don't believe for a second that Germany is 30% cheaper to live in than the States. It's nowhere near as expensive as some of the UK, but it is not amazingly cheap either. I expect monthly rent on a decent sized place for one or two persons to be in the region of E600 in somewhere like Berlin, and I'd expect that you'll lose between 1/4 and 1/3rd of your salary in tax before you even see it.
I'm not too well versed about Germany, but every country I have been to always claims they're the cheapest one out there to attract working force. So I would really hope for someone FROM Germany to chime in on this issue at this point.
I don't believe for a second that Germany is 30% cheaper to live in than the States. It's nowhere near as expensive as some of the UK, but it is not amazingly cheap either. I expect monthly rent on a decent sized place for one or two persons to be in the region of E600 in somewhere like Berlin, and I'd expect that you'll lose between 1/4 and 1/3rd of your salary in tax before you even see it.
Its very different from place to place.
here is the mietspiegel (rent mirror) of berlin which shows ususal rent prices.
Are there many new studios opening up in Germany? I hear the country in general is doing well, but I don't know how that translates into games.
no, actualy many studios are just outsorcing or splitting under small contractors(which ususaly go bankrupt after project is done). small contractors unite themselfes in working groups (split the rent for workingplace. exchange sheulders and work in loose connections with eachothers.) some new culture spots are opening in Berlin or Dresden.
Also i will not say Germany is doing well. the working pure plage hit very hard here and it doesnt look like german goverment is going to change anything next decade.
I love how every one assumes that paying taxes is a bad thing...
If you have cancer in europe (not the UK) you wont have to sell your house or your children's kidneys to pay for the meds....
in France a senior gets about 2500-3000 euros, it can go higher with experience or if you're really awesome and market yourself well . Germany is about the same ( I am German and live in Paris), though rent is cheaper ( I have a 2 bedroom,1livingroom appartment and we pay 1400 euros rent a month, Paris is freaking expensive).
This summer I took a trip to Canada and the US (Boston) and found that the cost of living was about the same and that there actually is good food in the US ( who would have believed that) and that the people there weren't ignorant assholes (pretty nice folks actually)
However Bruxelles has approved the funding of video games (like Canada Studios get money back from taxes) so that Europe might be a place of interest for the next 4-5 years.
in Germany and France, if you earn 2500 a month you'll pay about 1800 euros a year as income tax, however you get 4-5 weeks paid vacation and your company has to pay medical insurance and so on. It aint so bad, you wont buy a ferrari but you'll have it good living in a beautifull city and, oh yeah, you won't be layed off like a piece of shit because the law protects you.
Wow, that's really not that much at all. I'm by no mean senior at all, but I get more than E2500 per month, and I think I would struggle to live on less (my rent is around E1300 per month, but I also lose more than the remaining half of my income on shittons of taxes. Income tax in the UK is relatively low, but they slap the tax on everywhere else they can, and I mean everywhere.
2500-3000 is what you get on your paycheck all the taxes have been payed by your employer other than the income tax and property/habitation tax (500-1000/year) the money is pretty much yours
there's lots of smallish local studios there and some big hitters (e.g. Crytek). There's quite a difference in salaries between those. I wouldn't say Germany is an easy location. Given the size of the country, there aren't many game devs there.
Pay used to be average, probably still is. Living there can be extremely cheap if you're outside a bigger city. Berlin is cheap too compared to other EU capitals and it's one of the CG hubs in Germany.
I would have advised against Germany in the past, but with the UK industry being so volatile, it may be a good location for now.
ambershee: E1300 rent? ouch. that is expensive. What are you getting for this? House? 4 bedroom apt? Rents in Germany should be much lower. I even found rents in Scandinavia not as outrageous as I assumend they would be (highest quality of living, most expensive place, yadda yadda)
Berlin is cheap too compared to other EU capitals and it's one of the CG hubs in Germany.
really? what's in berlin these days, CG-wise?
anyway, cost of living will greatly differ between east and west, north and south, small and big city. most studios, games and film are located in the former west germany.
expensive places to live in are munich, frankfurt, hamburg, stuttgart and to a lesser extent cologne and duesseldorf.
games surely is growing in germany but like elsewhere definitely not much in the console dev sector, everyone goes casual, app-store, browser-based if they can.
for seniors, wages should turn out higher than UK ones. more deductions (some can be claimed back after leaving the country) and generally lower prices. a couple years ago when the pound was still worth something, UK pay gave you more buying power after deductions though.
2500-3000 is what you get on your paycheck all the taxes have been payed by your employer other than the income tax and property/habitation tax (500-1000/year) the money is pretty much yours
If income tax is indeed 40%, it really doesn't leave you with much (E1500 from E2500). It's not like you cannot live on that of course, because you certainly can quite comfortably.
ambershee is in Guildford, UK, Kwramm. So that's not an unusual price.
My rent is cheap for this area; I was very lucky to get a good deal. For the record, a two bedroom house like this would normally rent for around E1800 per month. A good size family house could have rents of double that (don't move to Guildford!).
haaa.. man never thoug I would see some thread like this.. an us american want's to come to germany... for games!!
However. Some native germans posted in here with good numbers to calc with zad.
I'm @ Mülheim currently and I pay under 400E for a 2 room apartment. In munich you would pay 600-700 for the same space. Food costs not that much, again compared to munich.
It may vary, I know UK pays slightly better than germany and france, but it might go from:
2500€ / 3200€ for regulars, and 3000€ / 4200€ for seniors. (This is before taxes, so take +/- 40% of that value, and it will be your income)
It's a small two-bedroom house that's quite a way out of town (40 minutes walk).
My rent is cheap for this area; I was very lucky to get a good deal. For the record, a two bedroom house like this would normally rent for around E1800 per month. A good size family house could have rents of double that (don't move to Guildford!).
The spacious 4-bed house I live in (Brighton) is about that ... and its 5mins walk from the middle of the city
Just to get some numbers out. I'll be a junior artist at my first ever job, though it's not in the games industry I'll be getting 2300€ and after taxes There'll be around 1700€ left to live on.
The rent for my new apartment will be around 500€ and that's for roughly 40m² with 2 rooms in a city that's supposed to be expensive. Since that'll be my first own apartment I've no compairson on how expensive this'll be compaired to others though.
Tax is around 30% here, living inside the cities can be expensive but it doesnt have to be. In general, germany is one of the cheaper countries in europe to live and as others mentioned you get healthinsurance (including teeth check ups and stuff) payed by the employer.
The three southern states (Hesse, Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg) are the most expensive ones, Berlin is probably the cheapest unless you go deep into the former GDR. Hamburg and Cologne are midrange.
It's not that it's all just gone, well it kinda is. But it goes to all kinds of places that'll benefit you once you're unemployed or when you're retired, the rest of it goes into health care.
So basivly you won't see any of it as long as you stay healthy and keep the job, except of the retirement money, which seems like it's not enough to help you out all that well...
But yeah I'm just at the start, so I don't have any actual experiences with it and that's mostly just a REALY rough outline.
But as I said, from the 2300 I'll get 'only' ~1700 actually get to me.
ambershee is in Guildford, UK, Kwramm. So that's not an unusual price.
If you compare it with most of the rest of the world, it is But do I know the joys of living in London... stayed there for a while. Was cool but absurdly expensive when it came to rent. I haven't come across a more expensive place for renting... maybe Silicon Valley, NYC? I would still consider London in the future, I like it there, but with the UK games industry in shambles I'm gonna stay in Asia for a while. Its okay and fairly secure there, and still interesting.
In Norway, Europe's most expensive country to live in, I could rent a 1br apt with garage space for EUR 900,-. But that is a top notch place then, all new with all appliances and nice location. Now Germany should be cheaper than that.
In Berlin spacious old flats can be quite cheap. Same in Vienna. Rent can be ridiculously low compared to some other big European cities.
I guess I shouldn't repeat what other people tell me. But supposedly there's more there than anywhere else when it comes to CG (not just games - film, visualization, browser based stuff, other small scale development). Then again doing CG in Germany is though. I gave up on that idea pretty soon and sought my luck elsewhere. Otherwise I just heard there's Frankfurt (but maybe it's just big on people's radars because of Crytek?) and some film related stuff in Munich. From what I keep hearing from the Austrians and Germans I know there's not much else there. There's also some studios in Austria (Sproing, Rabcat) but tht's not Germany.
For anyone interested, a list with all game developement studios in germany. That includes everything from small to big and from browser games and small apps to AAA games. Click me!
It's not that it's all just gone, well it kinda is. But it goes to all kinds of places that'll benefit you once you're unemployed or when you're retired, the rest of it goes into health care.
So basivly you won't see any of it as long as you stay healthy and keep the job, except of the retirement money, which seems like it's not enough to help you out all that well...
But yeah I'm just at the start, so I don't have any actual experiences with it and that's mostly just a REALY rough outline.
But as I said, from the 2300 I'll get 'only' ~1700 actually get to me.
yeah i get that, but it just seems unfair, altho the US, is close behind.
My salary went down about 30% moving from LA to Cologne, but it was totally worth it. I loved living there, and the overall quality of life stayed the same or higher with how purchasing power and public transportation/medical/etc all worked out.
Give it a go, Germany is great. Just not as great as Iceland. :-D
I go to FMX every year - http://www.fmx.de/ and I can see vast economic improvements every time I go, better cars, better dressed people, all the shops open, clean busses, trams and all that jazz, it really is a country on the way up.
If I was not enjoying Lecturing at the UH so much and wanted to go back into the games industry then Germany would be up there on my to do list, fantastic country .next to Switzerland and the UK off course ｡◕ ‿ ◕｡
I am dreaming about summer in Germany now with all those out side cafes and fantastic food & Beer!!
It may vary, I know UK pays slightly better than germany and france, but it might go from:
2500 / 3200 for regulars, and 3000 / 4200 for seniors. (This is before taxes, so take +/- 40% of that value, and it will be your income)
Coming through Search to this thread and i must say - even its 2 years old - there isnt changing much.
I dont get why the salary is such a joke - as a jung professional these days, you have to bring so much skills and knowledge with you - to land a position.
Also there is ALOT money in this industry, but i feels like often people are so glad to do something with games, that you sound greedy if you ask for "more" - ask for a solid/standard salary.
Is there somebody out there, who sees it the same way ?
Doesnt seems that this is changing in the future - i dont want to buy a ferrari - but i want to say, that maybe we should aks for a bit more to higher the standart outcome. An professional IT guy earns min. 4th more then an artist on the same level. (open market, germany)
By all the love in this industry - that makes me sometimes scratch my head.
Well there's a lot of young professionals these days and the quality and number of university courses seems to increase slowly but steadily. I'm curious how things will look then years from now. For the near future I'd be very surprised to see rising salaries, especially for entry level positions.
It's a small two-bedroom house that's quite a way out of town (40 minutes walk)
just for comparison, we pay 1300 euro as well, 180sqm, 4 rooms, one giant livingroom/kitchen of almost 90 sqm and a huge ass balkony. right in the heart of the eastern city. 5min to alexanderplatz with the subway
berlin can be pretty cheap, especially compared to cologne, hamburg or munich. but prizes are ramping up since years - we are lucky as the appartment is meant for artists. the flat i lived in before might be around 50% more expensive than 6 years ago, most likely without anything beeing changed by the owner.
@thomasp: it depends on what you want. AAA there is only yager. Filmwise Trixter is here now, Potsdam Babelsberg is "close". Tons of advertisement outlets. And well for mobile and webbased games there are King, Wooga, Bigpoint, Exozet.
Conceptwise Sixmorevodka, Karakter and us (maybe more). Tons of promising indies, other smaller studios. Compared to many other cities, you could call it a hub. But its definitely not L.A.
Replies
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/01/daily-chart-3
(some poor working go with 3-6 euros and get paid up by social care.)
so far i know modelers employed by companies go with middle class salaries.. something around 3000 euros. depending on your position and importance of the project. but nummbers are smoke. just see what they pay by hour and what will be in your poked after all taxes and insurances are taken. if you can live with it go ahead. there are some artist comunities in your area. sometimes they work like unions so you can get tips about salaries insurances and other stuff. just look there.
uh, it already is, bro. Who do you think is giving out the loans?
swiss and british bankers running deutsche banks.:poly121:
I'm not too well versed about Germany, but every country I have been to always claims they're the cheapest one out there to attract working force. So I would really hope for someone FROM Germany to chime in on this issue at this point.
Its very different from place to place.
here is the mietspiegel (rent mirror) of berlin which shows ususal rent prices.
http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/mietspiegel/de/wohnlagenkarte.shtml
here is another website which is very good for local research
http://www.meinestadt.de/
and sure you need to know german.
no, actualy many studios are just outsorcing or splitting under small contractors(which ususaly go bankrupt after project is done). small contractors unite themselfes in working groups (split the rent for workingplace. exchange sheulders and work in loose connections with eachothers.) some new culture spots are opening in Berlin or Dresden.
here the "Game developer" organisation in germany
http://www.game-bundesverband.de/
dont know how serious they are. so be carefuly.
Also i will not say Germany is doing well. the working pure plage hit very hard here and it doesnt look like german goverment is going to change anything next decade.
Expect to loose around 40% of your pay to taxation if you are not married.
If you have cancer in europe (not the UK) you wont have to sell your house or your children's kidneys to pay for the meds....
in France a senior gets about 2500-3000 euros, it can go higher with experience or if you're really awesome and market yourself well . Germany is about the same ( I am German and live in Paris), though rent is cheaper ( I have a 2 bedroom,1livingroom appartment and we pay 1400 euros rent a month, Paris is freaking expensive).
This summer I took a trip to Canada and the US (Boston) and found that the cost of living was about the same and that there actually is good food in the US ( who would have believed that) and that the people there weren't ignorant assholes
However Bruxelles has approved the funding of video games (like Canada Studios get money back from taxes) so that Europe might be a place of interest for the next 4-5 years.
Actually studios are looking for people in France check it out here : http://emploi.afjv.com/emploi_offres.php
in Germany and France, if you earn 2500 a month you'll pay about 1800 euros a year as income tax, however you get 4-5 weeks paid vacation and your company has to pay medical insurance and so on. It aint so bad, you wont buy a ferrari but you'll have it good living in a beautifull city and, oh yeah, you won't be layed off like a piece of shit because the law protects you.
Wow, that's really not that much at all. I'm by no mean senior at all, but I get more than E2500 per month, and I think I would struggle to live on less (my rent is around E1300 per month, but I also lose more than the remaining half of my income on shittons of taxes. Income tax in the UK is relatively low, but they slap the tax on everywhere else they can, and I mean everywhere.
Pay used to be average, probably still is. Living there can be extremely cheap if you're outside a bigger city. Berlin is cheap too compared to other EU capitals and it's one of the CG hubs in Germany.
I would have advised against Germany in the past, but with the UK industry being so volatile, it may be a good location for now.
ambershee: E1300 rent? ouch. that is expensive. What are you getting for this? House? 4 bedroom apt? Rents in Germany should be much lower. I even found rents in Scandinavia not as outrageous as I assumend they would be (highest quality of living, most expensive place, yadda yadda)
really? what's in berlin these days, CG-wise?
anyway, cost of living will greatly differ between east and west, north and south, small and big city. most studios, games and film are located in the former west germany.
expensive places to live in are munich, frankfurt, hamburg, stuttgart and to a lesser extent cologne and duesseldorf.
games surely is growing in germany but like elsewhere definitely not much in the console dev sector, everyone goes casual, app-store, browser-based if they can.
for seniors, wages should turn out higher than UK ones. more deductions (some can be claimed back after leaving the country) and generally lower prices. a couple years ago when the pound was still worth something, UK pay gave you more buying power after deductions though.
If income tax is indeed 40%, it really doesn't leave you with much (E1500 from E2500). It's not like you cannot live on that of course, because you certainly can quite comfortably.
It's a small two-bedroom house that's quite a way out of town (40 minutes walk).
My rent is cheap for this area; I was very lucky to get a good deal. For the record, a two bedroom house like this would normally rent for around E1800 per month. A good size family house could have rents of double that (don't move to Guildford!).
However. Some native germans posted in here with good numbers to calc with zad.
I'm @ Mülheim currently and I pay under 400E for a 2 room apartment. In munich you would pay 600-700 for the same space. Food costs not that much, again compared to munich.
2500€ / 3200€ for regulars, and 3000€ / 4200€ for seniors. (This is before taxes, so take +/- 40% of that value, and it will be your income)
The spacious 4-bed house I live in (Brighton) is about that ... and its 5mins walk from the middle of the city
The rent for my new apartment will be around 500€ and that's for roughly 40m² with 2 rooms in a city that's supposed to be expensive. Since that'll be my first own apartment I've no compairson on how expensive this'll be compaired to others though.
Hope this helps a bit.
The three southern states (Hesse, Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg) are the most expensive ones, Berlin is probably the cheapest unless you go deep into the former GDR. Hamburg and Cologne are midrange.
holy fuck, 40%!!?
It's not that it's all just gone, well it kinda is. But it goes to all kinds of places that'll benefit you once you're unemployed or when you're retired, the rest of it goes into health care.
So basivly you won't see any of it as long as you stay healthy and keep the job, except of the retirement money, which seems like it's not enough to help you out all that well...
But yeah I'm just at the start, so I don't have any actual experiences with it and that's mostly just a REALY rough outline.
But as I said, from the 2300 I'll get 'only' ~1700 actually get to me.
If you compare it with most of the rest of the world, it is
In Norway, Europe's most expensive country to live in, I could rent a 1br apt with garage space for EUR 900,-. But that is a top notch place then, all new with all appliances and nice location. Now Germany should be cheaper than that.
In Berlin spacious old flats can be quite cheap. Same in Vienna. Rent can be ridiculously low compared to some other big European cities.
I guess I shouldn't repeat what other people tell me. But supposedly there's more there than anywhere else when it comes to CG (not just games - film, visualization, browser based stuff, other small scale development). Then again doing CG in Germany is though. I gave up on that idea pretty soon and sought my luck elsewhere. Otherwise I just heard there's Frankfurt (but maybe it's just big on people's radars because of Crytek?) and some film related stuff in Munich. From what I keep hearing from the Austrians and Germans I know there's not much else there. There's also some studios in Austria (Sproing, Rabcat) but tht's not Germany.
Click me!
takes a few years to make it comfortable to work here again
Give it a go, Germany is great. Just not as great as Iceland. :-D
If I was not enjoying Lecturing at the UH so much and wanted to go back into the games industry then Germany would be up there on my to do list, fantastic country .next to Switzerland and the UK off course ｡◕ ‿ ◕｡
I am dreaming about summer in Germany now with all those out side cafes and fantastic food & Beer!!
[ame="
Coming through Search to this thread and i must say - even its 2 years old - there isnt changing much.
I dont get why the salary is such a joke - as a jung professional these days, you have to bring so much skills and knowledge with you - to land a position.
Also there is ALOT money in this industry, but i feels like often people are so glad to do something with games, that you sound greedy if you ask for "more" - ask for a solid/standard salary.
Is there somebody out there, who sees it the same way ?
Doesnt seems that this is changing in the future - i dont want to buy a ferrari - but i want to say, that maybe we should aks for a bit more to higher the standart outcome. An professional IT guy earns min. 4th more then an artist on the same level. (open market, germany)
By all the love in this industry - that makes me sometimes scratch my head.
just for comparison, we pay 1300 euro as well, 180sqm, 4 rooms, one giant livingroom/kitchen of almost 90 sqm and a huge ass balkony. right in the heart of the eastern city. 5min to alexanderplatz with the subway
berlin can be pretty cheap, especially compared to cologne, hamburg or munich. but prizes are ramping up since years - we are lucky as the appartment is meant for artists. the flat i lived in before might be around 50% more expensive than 6 years ago, most likely without anything beeing changed by the owner.
@thomasp: it depends on what you want. AAA there is only yager. Filmwise Trixter is here now, Potsdam Babelsberg is "close". Tons of advertisement outlets. And well for mobile and webbased games there are King, Wooga, Bigpoint, Exozet.
Conceptwise Sixmorevodka, Karakter and us (maybe more). Tons of promising indies, other smaller studios. Compared to many other cities, you could call it a hub. But its definitely not L.A.
I don't live there anymore.