The downward slope for artists salaries.
polycounter lvl 18
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/190895/The_downward_salary_slope_for_game_artists.php
Anyone happen to catch this yet, the article is about the massive decline of artists salaries over the last 2 decades, when adjusted to take inflation into account, artist salaries have fallen over 45%.
The article concludes due to increase of game diploma factory schools and ease of access to software it has increased the pool of available artist thus driving down salaries.
Really sad to see.
Anyone happen to catch this yet, the article is about the massive decline of artists salaries over the last 2 decades, when adjusted to take inflation into account, artist salaries have fallen over 45%.
The article concludes due to increase of game diploma factory schools and ease of access to software it has increased the pool of available artist thus driving down salaries.
Really sad to see.
Replies
That or there are some millionaire game artists out there throwing the results.
overall average salaries fell 10%, not too bad in this day and age as all careers, with the exception of upper management types, are getting shafted so bad that the middle class is disappearing.
a career that offers around 50k+medical+401 is the best most can hope for, and a hell of a lot more then a significant portion of the population will ever get.
plus its a career making cool shit for games and making 10's or 100's of thousands of people happy (..cough..yes I'm talking about gamers).
I understand how it can feel like you're being devalued and taken advantage of, but if you look at it in a larger context, its still an awesome job.
don't get too sad.
If $75k is the norm, then there's nothing to complain about.. Having $75k a year salary in a country like Denmark where we pay up to 40% taxes is way above average.
I think geographical considerations need to be taken into account when it comes to salaries. 75k would be above the average in Denmark. 40% tax and the fact,Denmark is one of the most expensive countries in the world. In the U.S i imagine a Salary in California compared to a salary in Texas would denote quite a difference.
I'm more worried about the continuing oversupply of artists in the industry, in the face of frequent downsizing by companies. I'd rather take a minor pay cut than end up unemployed for huge periods of time. It seems to be significantly harder to get art gigs in the industry these days.
That was also my point, if you get 75k in the US where the general cost of living and taxation is lower then a country like Denmark where 75k would be a very good salary, then I don't see a problem in the current wages. However that being said, I'm not that into the cost of having healt care etc. in the US.
In the 90's 3D art was an insanely closed and technical field, very few people knew what they were doing. It required specific software that ran on specific workstations that both cost about as much as mid range luxury cars. There were no training programs or schools set up. The handful of people who figured out how to operate the systems where more technical than artistic and anyone who could cobble together even a basic reel (chrome sphere hovering over checkerboard) was deemed worthy of doing it all, modeling, materials, lighting, even animating. They were wined dined and given signing bonuses. They also got in on the ground floor as many of the big name companies and studios took off. Being integral employees, they were not hired and fired enmass. Most of the time people got in and ended up sitting down with Wavefront manuals as thick as phone books trying to figure things out as they went with very little help from the outside world.
Fast forward to now were its the "hot new career" pedaled by every kind of for profit school, to anyone even mildly interested in doing something creative. The flood of applicants has driven prices down while the business types realize the pool of talent is now mostly replaceable.
I personally think there are many more factors in the salary decline, like the entire dynamic of studios shifting from making something out of love for the craft to studios being sold to publishers for giant payouts. As money took priority it attracted a certain type of people (business and finance washouts that dazzled tech nerds with their financial prowess). Studios became at that point something that was to be inflated and sold off.
Also once a business enters a decline its employees go into panic mode and aren't interested in taking risks. Talented people typically jump ship and it leads to a brain drain. Those left aren't interested in taking risks or getting noticed so they tend to cocoon and hope they don't get cut loose. Once a studio is out of money and looking to cut staff that flood of talent that gets released drives prices downward also.
Basically, the good old days are never coming back. Get used to it, you're now disposable unless you happen to find a company that doesn't treat its employees like toilet paper. Surprisingly enough those are the ones doing just fine and even doing new things.
A fine analysis overall. And you're right, the "good old days" aren't coming back. Of course, some would argue that the "good old days" were never really here. While the chaos of the early days of 3D modeling in the game industry offered a lot of opportunity, they also made it a lot harder to get into the industry. (as you pointed out, specialized knowledge, hardware, and extremely expensive software were pre-requisites)
I personally feel that there is going to be a fairly large shift in the way that games are both developed and published in the coming years. While the technology behind games has matured significantly, the business and management behind them hasn't. The management and organization of both game developers and publishers is due for a major overhaul. There's real opportunity for a leaner, flexible, and more efficient game industry.
When this change takes place, there's going to be a greater emphasis on fostering and seeking out talent. The more successful developers will be the ones who are able to organize the best teams.
So when you can do your web design and your art is as good as that guy from GoW then feel free to claim your big check.see where we are going with this thread?
oh and where we are going with this thread? o.O Its a pretty worry some topic, which kinda links up to my post about AGE of an Artist. Cause for example someone being more experienced and in mid 40s can be fired easily and 2 younger artist with less experience can fill his/her place on half the salary split between two. If you know what i mean.
I would like to think that in the industry seniority carries a lot of weight.
Also... age to me comes not as bagagge when we interview... we just look at years of experience along with their resume and portfolio. If its great, then we bring them in. Thats about it. So where would the age tie into all of this? I have worked with people that are close or over 50 and they are fountains of knowledge and perspective, and i have learned a lot from them. So what makes them easy target to be replaced?
If i am over 45 i have less of a chance to succeed in the industry that is tailored for young audiences? I am just trying to follow the train of thought here. I have never heard of a 45 year old getting fired to be replaced by 2 entry level artists. Just the amount of work that senior can do with his experience is significantly higher than 2 artists that need to be introduced to the company, method of workflows and what not.
Now the thread talks about the reduced salaries. IMO it comes a lot from Outsourcing... i don't believe in the concept of outsourcing.
But i have no real solution to how to improve salaries over all for artists. The Game Dev magazine had a good breakdown of salaries.
I completely agree.
Personally I see the industry as reverting back to what should be normal as the publishers more or less step out of the way. They had a lot of money and did some great things but they also set the bar for "success" really high. Making a few million over the cost of development was a failure in some cases on the publisher level, but at the studio level that would have been a smashing success and funded future ventures.
I don't think anyone would trade in the tools we have now for what was available back then and the tools (well most of them sans max) keep getting better. More detailed content is easier to generate with smaller teams.
The industry like every industry before it tried to solve the problem by throwing raw manpower at it and while that works some of the time it doesn't work for everything. Manufacturing, once done by a lot of manual labor is now handled with production lines and advanced machinery. Farming, same thing, now a handful of people work what was once dozens of farms with hundreds of people working on them. Textiles, mining, hotels and restaurants bla bla bla same thing, it goes on and on. They throw raw manpower at it and then someone makes the process more efficient.
Factories used to employ a lot of low wage, low education workers, they threw raw manpower at the problems they faced, need more done work them harder or get more workers. Now entire factores do the same things but do it with a handful of higher skill, higher wage employees.
Same is true for our industry. Last gen they tried to solve the problems much in the same way, they threw a lot of manpower at the problems and paid a heavy price for it. Going forward I think we will see a lot less specialists and a few more generalists as they manage more than once aspect of the pipeline. When I say generalists I don't mean people who are sort of good at a bunch of different things but I mean the old specialists that have chosen to specialize in more than one area and are god like in a few aspects.
Lowering the tech hurdle gets opens the door to a lot more people. If it gets any lower we will see a lot more people starting up new ventures. So I see a lot of opportunity, I just don't see it being exactly the same as the last time, driven by the same reasons.
It's been happening since the 1950s when everyone lived like kings. The reason the middle class income hasn't gone up is because the upper class income has been growing exponentially. All the major money goes to the few.
Yes, exactly. This approach can be applied to certain portions of the game development process. But you can't just use it as a blanket solution. The game publishers have implemented the method with the least amount of thought or care. The developers themselves have also been slow to adapt, clinging to their more traditional structure. Neither of these approaches have responded well to the bloat that comes from content demand.
A much better system would be one where the publishers function as a more involved superstructure, while the development houses are more fluid and flexible. Back-end development should happen under a permanent R&D department directly under the supervision of the publisher, while front-end and content development should be assigned to development teams that are formed on a per-project basis. Front end content developers and designers can be shifted to take turns working in and supporting the R&D department whenever they are between projects. (which would give even the assembly-line content creators a chance to flex their creativity)
The consistent slide in artist salaries is a natural consequence of the factory mentality applied to a drastic increase in supply. Under the current system, senior artists regularly get the axe simply because of their accrued salaries. There is no respect for experience and seniority in a mill that treats each artist as an asset to be used and discarded.
For the time being, artists who are looking for more stability or career opportunity would be well served to look elsewhere. There's increasing opportunity in the indie space, as well as a real need for talented, experienced artists. There's also greater financial risk, but also potential for financial gain. Small start-ups are usually much more willing to offer profit-sharing or stock options for their employees instead of high salaries.
Scan technology has another limitation that is hard to get around, it treats everything as one solid blobby piece. It doesn't understand that a belt is an object, its just a lump on the surface.
The saving might come in not having to hire armies of people to populate the world or realistic games with recreations of real world objects, or help assist artists in giving them a base to spring off of, but for some things that don't exist its going to be hard scan them.
So a publisher could have an incubator for ideas and then roll them out into production as teams finish up projects they can pick up new ones without having to go through the whole "you're fired, but reapply for the same job you were just doing in 6mo".
Basically treating production more like a conveyor belt (loops back around and picks up a new task) rather than some guy you hire to carry a box one time from point A to B.
Planning out resources for say a years worth of production and setting a staggered cycle so that as projects wind down there is a new one starting up. They could then look at the upcoming resources that are available and plan their design and development around games that team is good at making.
Or they could take that team into the incubator and do a bunch of vertical slices and as a group pick which they want to move forward on and then come together to make it happen. That is how pixar worked back in the day when it wasn't a sequel-mill, when they did cool new things. It's kind of how Valve works (based on my limited understanding) but would be more structured and forward looking than valve...
A rolling system like that with stability plays well into fostering creativity.
If you meet a creative persons needs they are much more free to focus on being creative. Constantly lay them off in a never ending cycle of temporary work and they focus on other things and don't take risks.
One of the main hurdles to a rolling dev cycle has been the ramp up of production. If you can hatch a project right when its ready to ramp up then the team can just take it and run.
The other catch is that the constant cycle of layoffs generates a permanent pool of short-term unemployed, which in turn keeps wages and salaries low. Larger publishing houses know this all too well, and work this system to their advantage.
Yeah now that I think about it, my current studio does that. Our games are very episodic so I can tell you what task I will be doing a year from now but I won't know the exact details.
Our design team knows;
In 6mo we can create and animate 5 characters, they have an overall word count and animation complexity guideline to work off of and they fill in the blanks with new content that fits.
We have 5 environment artists, we know what they can pull off in that time, and the design team fills in the environments.
It's not so much, dream up a game and then hire/fire people to make that happen. It's more about designing a game that we can do with the resources we have. It works for us, I've been here for 7 years and we have very low turn over.
Yes, and this is a major problem with the modern game industry. A publisher who maintained their own R&D department apart from any individual developer would have a major advantage. I'm still not sure why they seem so resistant to the idea. Investing in a communal pool of tools and resources that are made available to all of the developers that a publisher owns just seems like such a good investment. It would make it much easier for individual developers to pick and choose features and tools to incorporate into their titles, and would make each studio's work much easier to recycle into other projects.
Another good approach to an R&D division would be to make the salary for non-full-time R&D employees much lower. Keep it within normal living wage, but lower than more specialized jobs. Working in the R&D department would be temporary for most of its members. It would be a place for a two or three month break between projects, and a way of providing stability and consistency. There could be a core team of permanent R&D personel that would primarily consist of coders. Their job would be to constantly maintain, update, and document the publisher's tools, and incorporate the work of the temporary R&D workers into the pipeline.
For the current industry model focused on console development and big retail releases, you are correct. The kind of projects currently being worked on need the kind of performance that custom coding for each platform enables.
But for general, smaller PC, mobile, and tablet development? In an environment like that, where retail releases are taken out of the picture, this sort of model becomes much more viable. A competitive publisher/developer who adopted this kind of model, with a much more integrated and managed toolset for its development teams to draw from for tools and gameplay, would have a huge competitive edge.
This is not going to happen with any major publisher with publically traded shares. Such ideas do not create the greatest quarterly profits, or even annual. Thus a publisher cannot implement such without the ire of the shareholders yelling for increased stock worth.
The only place this will happen is outside major publishers or studios beholden to said publishers.
That is quite accurate.
My gf is a compositor in the film industry, in order to get the skills needed for that job she went to a trade school. Now she owes like $50k in loans, but can only afford to pay off the interest incurred, so despite paying over $600 monthly to Sally Mae, her total (what she owes) doesnt even go down. She showed me her paycheck the other day, $3500 for 2 weeks of work (12 hour shifts and weekends). She gets $2400 because taxes took the rest. Then its off to pay the student loan, her rent, cost of operating a car and having insurance...ect and really even then shes left with very little to add to savings. Here in California, the cost of living is exceptionally high.
Over all it is not a pretty scenario.
Now if you look at the supposed revenue generated by the game industry, it is more than the film, tv, and music industries combined for their primary market. One would hope that the revenue acquired would reflect on pay, but thats far from being the case.
one thing I would suggest that most people probably dont do is just ask for a rediculous ammount. if you have already been interviewed on site there is pretty much no way they wont atleast counter offer with something a bit lower. whenever im interviewing I am super frank with how much im making and definitley make it clear I am not willing to take a pay cut. I think part of the problem is people are afraid to look greedy and ask for what they think is fair or a pimp ass salaray. you gotta realize that while you might feel it reflects badly on you......just think about how much unpaid overtime this industry has and how most companies dont really give a shit about you when push comes to shove.
whenever you interview, pimp it like a boss and get that cheddar
then again I love montreal, the nightlife, the women, the people, the summer...oooooo baby.
http://pixelenemy.com/activision-ceo-bobby-kotick-made-64-9-million-in-2012-among-highest-paid-ceos-in-u-s/
at least for Activision Blizzard, you know where most of the money is going to. i wonder how the people working there feel about it.
lol thats like funding for 2 MMO's.
his normal 8 million dollar salary alone could keep 80-100 of us employed. wonder if he does an entire studios worth of work each day.
All I can say that it's a shame that in this world you either support industrialization or you are fucked.
This is a sad world we live in. Our countries want to churn out machines that work 9-5 on same monotonous tasks. No one gives a shit about art any more. Such a fucking shame, *spits on ground*
Edit: Just read Dataday's post. What he said about his gf is pretty true! Film industry is more location based.
Theirs no equation, it doesnt happen automatically, people are making calculated purposeful decisions.
Those with the money dont want to pay the artists adequately because they want the majority of the money for themselves and the artists dont care or dont believe they can do anything about it. Its not just in the art world either. As things go on wages will decline more as revenues get harder to increase.
As someone currently living in the DC Metro area. Yup. The cost of living in this area is ridiculously high. I've yet to fully understand why. Judging by the maddening amount of traffic on some of the poorest laid out and maintained roads I've ever seen, people must *really* like sprawl cities and pastel colored houses.
Your g/f needs to re-evaluate her expenses if she's barely getting by with that kind of pay cheque. Cheaper car? Cheaper place for rent. $2400 after taxes is by no means a low salary, and shouldnt even be in this conversation. My take home after taxes is under $1000 (twice a month). Yet, when I was in school, I was always told people just starting out generally get $800 a week. By thte time i finished school, i didnt get anything close to that, and im not the only one i know that is getting screwed like that. Salaries are definitely dropping.
Never EVER think of your school like this, even if it is indeed just a diploma mill. Think of what you learned, of what you can do! Have confidence in yourself and the skills you picked up despite all odds! Be humble, but never be ashamed of yourself, your education or your work! Everything else just drags your whole motivation down the gutter and that's not a good thing when starting out!
There's plenty of really good people who come from similar schools or had no schooling at all. Work on your skills, keep practicing and practicing and don't give up! I sure wanted to give up but nowadays I'm so happy I didn't and I'm having a great time in the industry. Don't let all the gloom bring you down!
Do you live in the LA or Bay area? Prices for sharing apartments can still be over 1000 a person. Especially if you don't want to drive 2 hours each day for work.