77K average creates a 60K to 80K ballpark. According to the article that includes all jobs including entry level jobs and QA testers where the starting salary is 15CAD/hr for QA testers and 19$/hr for 3d artists. That comes to an average of 30K to 40K annually.
And these are the bulk of hires, so how is the figure so inflated?
Its like the article assumes that every job in the game industry is the same and commands identical wages.
The pdf (on which the article is based) also assumes this wage to be across 171 companies in Ontario alone.
Of these only 4 are AAA and able to afford such a high average (even though they don't pay them evenly) The remainder are independent devs that contract out work, and rarely have full time employees so the article makes absolutely no sense on this matter either.
"[...] where the starting salary is 15CAD/hr for QA testers and 19$/hr for 3d artists. That comes to an average of 30K to 40K annually. And these are the bulk of hires, so how is the figure so inflated?"
Well, this could also mean that people who are *not* QA testers and 3d modelers are much better at negotiating their salary that the people in these two categories.
@pior- that is possible, most companies aren't willing to negotiate with juniors knowing there's always going to be an artist willing to work for less. The article should distinguish between seniors and juniors rather than make a blanket statement about how profitable working in the games industry in Canada appears to be. That would probably slow down the mass unemployment we're having here in Ontario, most students starting out here actually think they would be making atleast 50K fresh out of college because of fluff pieces like this. Even the best junior artists are commanding less owing to the saturation in the market.
Well, it's also about reading statistics a certain way.
For instance, considering an average salary of 70k in this field/area ... nothing prevents an artist with a good sense of his/her own self worth from negotiating for 150k. There's no point lowballing !
True, but boy do the companies low ball big time. Also the bulk of the wage is paid for by the governments grant, basically our taxes paid back to us as wages.
Most fresh graduates willingly low ball themselves just to get their foot in the door. They compare their ridiculous wage with minimum wage jobs though many of them aspire to make 100,000 K in 5 years o_O working in the same company.
I dunno, i know of enviro artists in vancouver making 120k + stock/bonuses, and plenty of senior artists in montreal making 80-90k+.
As for the problem of negotiating as a jr artist, i can see that but also companys really do like to find the right fit personality wise, so if your art is amazing and you ace the interview on a social lecel, you have a bit of wiggle room.
The quickest way to up your salary isnt to wait for a yearly raise, but to change jobs. Thanks to the transition to vancouver mostly offering contract work, i always had the next gig lined up in advance, which helped to basically double my salary over the course of a year and a half.
Also, i find most people make the mistake of telling a studio either how much they are making at their current job, or the studio asks how much you would want and the person lowballs themselves by not wanting to seem greedy, when there is usually atleast 10k more left on the table. Its straight business, which sometimes creatives and introverts are not super comfortable with, making it easy to get lowballed or even self sabotage unknowingly.
My advice for salary negotiation, if a studio asks in the phone interview how much you are making reply woth something like this: "id be happy to talk numbers at a later point, but right now i want to focus on making sure this is a good fit for the both of us first"
who says that?! Someone who knows they have options and employment needs to be a 2 way street and a good fit vs someone who is needy and desperatley wants the job. Ironically, the more you seem to want the job, the less attractive you are to employers and the more leverage they have to lowball you.
But yea, long story short, there are plenty of studys showing that those who change employers every 1-2 years end up with double the salary of someone who stays at one job for the same 5-10 year time period.
The problem I had with the article is that it doesn't seem to acknowledge this aspect of the game industry, that artists who make an average like that move around quite a bit and are in senior roles.
The article makes it look like everyone commands that wage, like its industry standard regardless of your level, skill or seniority. It makes it a fluff piece to attract more people into game dev without going into specifics, kind of like those ad's on social media for online game dev courses.
I've found negotiating for a higher rate here in ontario gets you shown the door, even as a senior its difficult to command a rate equivalent to Montreal or Vancouver. There are a lot of needy and desperate people here. And Toronto is now more expensive to live in than both of them. It also has to do with the kind of work responsibility. Like I know for a fact that the bulk of the work in Ubisoft Toronto is work for hire for Montreal studio (and of course Paris) Maybe that affects the disparity in wage across the 3 different locations.
The problem I had with the article is that it doesn't seem to acknowledge this aspect of the game industry, that artists who make an average like that move around quite a bit and are in senior roles.
The article makes it look like everyone commands that wage, like its industry standard regardless of your level, skill or seniority. It makes it a fluff piece to attract more people into game dev without going into specifics, kind of like those ad's on social media for online game dev courses.
I've found negotiating for a higher rate here in ontario gets you shown the door, even as a senior its difficult to command a rate equivalent to Montreal or Vancouver. There are a lot of needy and desperate people here. And Toronto is now more expensive to live in than both of them. It also has to do with the kind of work responsibility. Like I know for a fact that the bulk of the work in Ubisoft Toronto is work for hire for Montreal studio (and of course Paris) Maybe that affects the disparity in wage across the 3 different locations.
I'm confused as to why you think the article makes it look like everyone commands that wage. Unless I'm missing sometihng, the only line in the article about salary simply says "The average salary for a job in Canada's video game industry is $77,300 a year."
The article doesn't make any attempt imply anything about that number other than what it is at face value. There are a wide variety of game industry jobs that command a wide range of salaries. It's kind of a leap to make the assumption based on that one sentence that "everyone commands that wage" regardless of skill or seniority.
Its because they don't specify how they came about the average.
Having that amount at face value suggests a very high industry average across all game industry jobs when the reality is that there is a significant disparity because there is a wide variety of the jobs you do.
It feels like the thing you would say to a student to get him to take a college program in game development when the reality is far from the truth.
Like they mention 171 game development companies in Ontario without actually saying that out of them only 4 are large AAA companies with the capacity of paying that average for a full time job at some point in their career.
Its important that they go into specifics of how studios operate, the kind of financial assistance they get from government funding and how much work is offloaded to part time contractors. The least they could do is specify an upper and lower limit to the average.
I felt that I should post this so newcomers who frequent this site know the reality and risks going in to game development in Canada and prepare accordingly.
What about it "suggests a very high industry average across all game industry jobs"? That's an inference you're making based on nothing stated in the article. While it is true that the article doesn't go into depth and break down the statistics for every job, skill, and seniority level, I don't think that was the intention of the article. The article is just throwing out some quick statistics about the state of the video games industry in Canada in general, they aren't somehow being disingenuous about the way they present the information.
If the article was about the Canadian film industry and it said "The average salary in the film industry is X dollars per year" that's obviously going to encompass all film industry jobs, everyone from extras to directors and executive producers. It would be foolish to assume that the "average salary" is approximately the same across all disciplines when nothing like that was stated explicitly or implicitly.
Such a high average suggests a junior rate in the high 50K's when it is
in the low 30K's sometimes lower. I know a lot of my classmates assumed
this when they signed up for game dev programs. The fluff they heard
from the schools was very similar to what is seen here.
The presentation (pdf) does come across like a positive marketing tool for the industry. The problem is that it is too general in its statistics.
As they didn't do a break down, I brought up the matter here instead so that there can be more elaboration on how a salary like this can be achieved (thanks @PixelMasher) and the skills and risks involved. One can easily assume the best possible outcome from the statistics provided, I just wanted to show that this is not always the case, and for an industry this diverse delving into its reality in depth is a good thing.
Having that amount at face value suggests a very high industry average across all game industry jobs when the reality is that there is a significant disparity because there is a wide variety of the jobs you do.
Such a high average suggests a junior rate in the high 50K's when it is
in the low 30K's sometimes lower. I know a lot of my classmates assumed
this when they signed up for game dev programs. The fluff they heard
from the schools was very similar to what is seen here.
The presentation (pdf) does come across like a positive marketing tool for the industry. The problem is that it is too general a statistic.
As they didn't do a break down, I brought up the matter here instead so that there can be more elaboration on how a salary like this can be achieved (thanks @PixelMasher) and the skills and risks involved. One can easily assume the best possible outcome from the statistics provided, I just wanted to show that this is not always the case, and for an industry this diverse delving into its reality in depth is a good thing.
I understand what you're saying, but my point is that you are assuming things that you should not be assuming.
"One can easily assume the best possible outcome..."
Well, one *can*, but as I stated, it would be foolish to do so. If the number stated is an average for all possible disciplines in an industry, all skill levels, and all experience levels, why would you automatically assume that a junior level in a certain discipline with very little experience is going to expect a salary near an overall industry average?
I understand wanting to see a more specific breakdown on these statistics. I think the IGDA salary survey does a much better job with that sort of thing, but that's obviously not what this article aimed to do, and saying things like "this article makes it seem like..." isn't true. You're making assumptions based on information that was not presented in an article which clearly is outlining a very limited set of data.
Edit: To go back to my film industry analogy, would a person getting their very first acting job as a background extra on an independent film expect to make $80k per year if they read a similar article stating that was the average salary for a Canadian film industry employee? I would certainly hope not. I would think that person would take into account the extremely wide range of jobs, salary, experience, and expertise and realize that they are probably going to be making significantly less than an overall industry average.
It is foolish to assume, but many students here do assume it to be a fact. They genuinely assume a much higher starting rate than what they get which they think would jump to a 100,000K in 5 years of just being at the job. Maybe its just an Ontario thing given how popular game dev education
though a publicly funded community college system is in this province
compared to the other provinces. Statistics like these are what colleges here use to attract students to their programs. Hence I wanted to invite more discussion on the matter here.
The more niche the position, the higher demand/pay. I know good senior fx artists and particle wizards make decent coin as they are few and far between compared to enviro/prop/character artists
niche down smartly and you can have a ton of offers to choose from.
According to wikipedia the game industry in Canada has 20,400 employees, 472 companies, and a direct annual economic impact of nearly $3 billion added to Canada's GDP in 2015.
Very simple estimate based on the fact that employees are by far the biggest expense in gaming industry:
($3.000.000.000 - 50% yield or profit) / 20,400 People = $73.529 per employee average
You're right in theory, though wikipedia isn't really an official source.
My issue was that this average doesn't hold across the different jobs, skill levels and contract work. That and the fact that not all companies are contributing equally to the economic impact, nor do they have the same level of investment.
Few select companies have support from the government at the expense of start ups and the taxpayer. Add to that the mad saturation and this affects ones earning potential in the long term since supply outweighs demand.
Given how volatile the industry is, I felt that pointing out the specifics would help give more insight to people starting out.
Of course, what are you expecting? We dont live in communism where everyone is more equal than the other.
20% of the people do 80% of the work while 80% of the money is earned by 20% of the people (not necessarily the ones that do all the work though). I dont need a chart to know that.
You and I know that. But a lot of newcomers in the industry don't and needlessly lowball themselves. Also its the larger AAA companies that operate in the way you described. There are many indie companies that operate like cooperatives and profit share. Many make no profit at all and they are the majority. Though the article considers them In the company count ,they dont factor very well onto the projected average that the article uses to treat the entire game industry in canada like its exclusively AAA with high paying full time jobs for everyone.
I just went and actualy read the article and it makes total sense to me.
They say that yes, a large majority of the studios in canada are indie devs, but almost all of them have less that 25 employees.
By contrast 83% of the work force in the industry works for huge aaa companies. So ofcourse the salary average is going to skew higher, as more of the industry is working for established companies can actually pay a decent wage. Studios like ubi montreal have over 3500 employees in on city alone, ea vancouver is huge too, as is ubi toronto etc. So while they make up only 14% of the overall number of studios they dwarf those small studios in terms of head count and overall economic contribution.
I dont think there is a huge illusion that juniors will be making bank, most people are aware that a junior artists starting salary is around 40-45k, sometimes less if its a smaller studio on a budget. You also have to factor in they are probably counting qa teams which can be quite large but their salaries are like 25k a year. If anything i think the 77k average is a bit low. And i doubt its factoring in bonuses, which in aaa studios can be quite huge.
In terms of indie studios, if they make a profit chances are the overall salarys are low with all the profits being paid out as bonuses or being funnelled back into the company for rapid growth, in wich case those numbers would be not accounted for in salary surveys. just depends how tolerant to risk someone is, are they willing to work for 25k a year on a project they believe in and delay financial gratification for 2-10 years and take they big end game payout of getting aquired or selling the business.
And in reality the market is the market. You should have an idea of your overall value by looking at your portfolio, years of experience etc. You can set your value and stick to it, but if you are not getting hired its probably because your price is too high in relation to the overall market. Companies are always going to pay you as little as possible to keep you around, while employees will want more. Only way to side step this is to increase your risk and become an entrepreneur/work for yourself.
On the flip side, if you are a total boss and insane artist, wich is clearly demonstrated by your portfolio, resume, and you ace the interview with great social skills (thats a huge part of the interview process) then i dont know many high salary artists not getting hired.
It comes down to self awareness and industry reasearch. Juniors will get a relativly lower salary in the beginning, its like that in almost every industry, experience becomes a multiplier.
Tl;dr: self awareness and setting your own value in the market is really someones own responsibility as an adult in the workforce. The more work you put in researching it through sites like glassdoor or raising it through new folio work/learning new skills, the better you will be paid. If you feel like you are getting screwed financially, its on you to do something about it. Theorizing and complaining achieves nothing.
Long story short, decent article that is a bit confusing until you re-read the numbers section a couple times, but also a decent indicator of the overall average.
What BS.
Replies
Either everyone's high or they are all liars.
That comes to an average of 30K to 40K annually.
And these are the bulk of hires, so how is the figure so inflated?
Its like the article assumes that every job in the game industry is the same and commands identical wages.
The pdf (on which the article is based) also assumes this wage to be across 171 companies in Ontario alone.
Of these only 4 are AAA and able to afford such a high average (even though they don't pay them evenly) The remainder are independent devs that contract out work, and rarely have full time employees so the article makes absolutely no sense on this matter either.
And these are the bulk of hires, so how is the figure so inflated?"
Well, this could also mean that people who are *not* QA testers and 3d modelers are much better at negotiating their salary that the people in these two categories.
The article should distinguish between seniors and juniors rather than make a blanket statement about how profitable working in the games industry in Canada appears to be.
That would probably slow down the mass unemployment we're having here in Ontario, most students starting out here actually think they would be making atleast 50K fresh out of college because of fluff pieces like this.
Even the best junior artists are commanding less owing to the saturation in the market.
For instance, considering an average salary of 70k in this field/area ... nothing prevents an artist with a good sense of his/her own self worth from negotiating for 150k. There's no point lowballing !
Also the bulk of the wage is paid for by the governments grant, basically our taxes paid back to us as wages.
If you average out the grants given to companies it comes to 130,435K per job, however the new hire only gets 30,000K
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/auditor-general-ontario-1.3351866
Most fresh graduates willingly low ball themselves just to get their foot in the door.
They compare their ridiculous wage with minimum wage jobs though many of them aspire to make 100,000 K in 5 years o_O working in the same company.
As for the problem of negotiating as a jr artist, i can see that but also companys really do like to find the right fit personality wise, so if your art is amazing and you ace the interview on a social lecel, you have a bit of wiggle room.
The quickest way to up your salary isnt to wait for a yearly raise, but to change jobs. Thanks to the transition to vancouver mostly offering contract work, i always had the next gig lined up in advance, which helped to basically double my salary over the course of a year and a half.
Also, i find most people make the mistake of telling a studio either how much they are making at their current job, or the studio asks how much you would want and the person lowballs themselves by not wanting to seem greedy, when there is usually atleast 10k more left on the table. Its straight business, which sometimes creatives and introverts are not super comfortable with, making it easy to get lowballed or even self sabotage unknowingly.
My advice for salary negotiation, if a studio asks in the phone interview how much you are making reply woth something like this:
"id be happy to talk numbers at a later point, but right now i want to focus on making sure this is a good fit for the both of us first"
who says that?! Someone who knows they have options and employment needs to be a 2 way street and a good fit vs someone who is needy and desperatley wants the job. Ironically, the more you seem to want the job, the less attractive you are to employers and the more leverage they have to lowball you.
But yea, long story short, there are plenty of studys showing that those who change employers every 1-2 years end up with double the salary of someone who stays at one job for the same 5-10 year time period.
The article makes it look like everyone commands that wage, like its industry standard regardless of your level, skill or seniority.
It makes it a fluff piece to attract more people into game dev without going into specifics, kind of like those ad's on social media for online game dev courses.
I've found negotiating for a higher rate here in ontario gets you shown the door, even as a senior its difficult to command a rate equivalent to Montreal or Vancouver. There are a lot of needy and desperate people here. And Toronto is now more expensive to live in than both of them.
It also has to do with the kind of work responsibility. Like I know for a fact that the bulk of the work in Ubisoft Toronto is work for hire for Montreal studio (and of course Paris) Maybe that affects the disparity in wage across the 3 different locations.
I'm confused as to why you think the article makes it look like everyone commands that wage. Unless I'm missing sometihng, the only line in the article about salary simply says "The average salary for a job in Canada's video game industry is $77,300 a year."
The article doesn't make any attempt imply anything about that number other than what it is at face value. There are a wide variety of game industry jobs that command a wide range of salaries. It's kind of a leap to make the assumption based on that one sentence that "everyone commands that wage" regardless of skill or seniority.
Having that amount at face value suggests a very high industry average across all game industry jobs when the reality is that there is a significant disparity because there is a wide variety of the jobs you do.
It feels like the thing you would say to a student to get him to take a college program in game development when the reality is far from the truth.
Like they mention 171 game development companies in Ontario without actually saying that out of them only 4 are large AAA companies with the capacity of paying that average for a full time job at some point in their career.
Its important that they go into specifics of how studios operate, the kind of financial assistance they get from government funding and how much work is offloaded to part time contractors.
The least they could do is specify an upper and lower limit to the average.
I felt that I should post this so newcomers who frequent this site know the reality and risks going in to game development in Canada and prepare accordingly.
If the article was about the Canadian film industry and it said "The average salary in the film industry is X dollars per year" that's obviously going to encompass all film industry jobs, everyone from extras to directors and executive producers. It would be foolish to assume that the "average salary" is approximately the same across all disciplines when nothing like that was stated explicitly or implicitly.
Such a high average suggests a junior rate in the high 50K's when it is in the low 30K's sometimes lower. I know a lot of my classmates assumed this when they signed up for game dev programs. The fluff they heard from the schools was very similar to what is seen here.
The presentation (pdf) does come across like a positive marketing tool for the industry. The problem is that it is too general in its statistics.
As they didn't do a break down, I brought up the matter here instead so that there can be more elaboration on how a salary like this can be achieved (thanks @PixelMasher) and the skills and risks involved.
One can easily assume the best possible outcome from the statistics provided,
I just wanted to show that this is not always the case, and for an industry this diverse delving into its reality in depth is a good thing.
"One can easily assume the best possible outcome..."
Well, one *can*, but as I stated, it would be foolish to do so. If the number stated is an average for all possible disciplines in an industry, all skill levels, and all experience levels, why would you automatically assume that a junior level in a certain discipline with very little experience is going to expect a salary near an overall industry average?
I understand wanting to see a more specific breakdown on these statistics. I think the IGDA salary survey does a much better job with that sort of thing, but that's obviously not what this article aimed to do, and saying things like "this article makes it seem like..." isn't true. You're making assumptions based on information that was not presented in an article which clearly is outlining a very limited set of data.
Edit: To go back to my film industry analogy, would a person getting their very first acting job as a background extra on an independent film expect to make $80k per year if they read a similar article stating that was the average salary for a Canadian film industry employee? I would certainly hope not. I would think that person would take into account the extremely wide range of jobs, salary, experience, and expertise and realize that they are probably going to be making significantly less than an overall industry average.
Maybe its just an Ontario thing given how popular game dev education though a publicly funded community college system is in this province compared to the other provinces.
Statistics like these are what colleges here use to attract students to their programs.
Hence I wanted to invite more discussion on the matter here.
niche down smartly and you can have a ton of offers to choose from.
Very simple estimate based on the fact that employees are by far the biggest expense in gaming industry:
($3.000.000.000 - 50% yield or profit) / 20,400 People = $73.529 per employee average
77k sounds about right then.
Pleaso correct me if I´m wrong!
20% of the people do 80% of the work while 80% of the money is earned by 20% of the people (not necessarily the ones that do all the work though). I dont need a chart to know that.
But a lot of newcomers in the industry don't and needlessly lowball themselves.
Also its the larger AAA companies that operate in the way you described.
There are many indie companies that operate like cooperatives and profit share. Many make no profit at all and they are the majority.
Though the article considers them In the company count ,they dont factor very well onto the projected average that the article uses to treat the entire game industry in canada like its exclusively AAA with high paying full time jobs for everyone.
They say that yes, a large majority of the studios in canada are indie devs, but almost all of them have less that 25 employees.
By contrast 83% of the work force in the industry works for huge aaa companies. So ofcourse the salary average is going to skew higher, as more of the industry is working for established companies can actually pay a decent wage. Studios like ubi montreal have over 3500 employees in on city alone, ea vancouver is huge too, as is ubi toronto etc. So while they make up only 14% of the overall number of studios they dwarf those small studios in terms of head count and overall economic contribution.
I dont think there is a huge illusion that juniors will be making bank, most people are aware that a junior artists starting salary is around 40-45k, sometimes less if its a smaller studio on a budget. You also have to factor in they are probably counting qa teams which can be quite large but their salaries are like 25k a year. If anything i think the 77k average is a bit low. And i doubt its factoring in bonuses, which in aaa studios can be quite huge.
In terms of indie studios, if they make a profit chances are the overall salarys are low with all the profits being paid out as bonuses or being funnelled back into the company for rapid growth, in wich case those numbers would be not accounted for in salary surveys. just depends how tolerant to risk someone is, are they willing to work for 25k a year on a project they believe in and delay financial gratification for 2-10 years and take they big end game payout of getting aquired or selling the business.
And in reality the market is the market. You should have an idea of your overall value by looking at your portfolio, years of experience etc. You can set your value and stick to it, but if you are not getting hired its probably because your price is too high in relation to the overall market. Companies are always going to pay you as little as possible to keep you around, while employees will want more. Only way to side step this is to increase your risk and become an entrepreneur/work for yourself.
On the flip side, if you are a total boss and insane artist, wich is clearly demonstrated by your portfolio, resume, and you ace the interview with great social skills (thats a huge part of the interview process) then i dont know many high salary artists not getting hired.
It comes down to self awareness and industry reasearch. Juniors will get a relativly lower salary in the beginning, its like that in almost every industry, experience becomes a multiplier.
Tl;dr: self awareness and setting your own value in the market is really someones own responsibility as an adult in the workforce. The more work you put in researching it through sites like glassdoor or raising it through new folio work/learning new skills, the better you will be paid. If you feel like you are getting screwed financially, its on you to do something about it. Theorizing and complaining achieves nothing.
Long story short, decent article that is a bit confusing until you re-read the numbers section a couple times, but also a decent indicator of the overall average.