Find out what studios pay for international workers in the States
polycounter lvl 10
http://www.h1bwage.com/
Check "employers" category, type in studio name (Blizzard, Pixar, etc.)
EDIT [studio name deleted], year 2011, 'Senior Production Artist" = $100,000
Found this link via somethingawful forum thread.
Check "employers" category, type in studio name (Blizzard, Pixar, etc.)
EDIT [studio name deleted], year 2011, 'Senior Production Artist" = $100,000
Found this link via somethingawful forum thread.
As for paid salaries... you can look up US based wage data based on alien work visas by studio and job position here:
http://www.h1bwage.com/
When a game studio or animation studio hires a foreign worker, the salary wage is public data, not tied to a name for privacy reasons but its' fairly accurate to get an idea of low/high ranges
Just punch in Sony Imageworks, lucasfilm, ilm, blizzard, dreamworks, pixar, disney etc. and you can see what comes up. Heck I found my wage in there and just figured out what my supervisor is making
Replies
and seemingly unrealistic...
nono.
It's very realistic.
So it would be like environment artist with 2 years experience in "insert obscure tool here".
The more of this sort of stuff they do, the more likely that they show there aren't suitable candidates who are citizens, but as you tack these things on the salary must increase accordingly to avoid the perception of immigrants "working for peanuts".
100k? Not really, considering you have to pay something like $35k in taxes alone.
So these very same peeps go either Freelance or go to greener pastures, and get payed for their skill.
Don't get me wrong, 45K isn't chump change, it's very good by many standards.
How come? I mean how it's economically feasible for them when you can have people working for half the price, just in a different location?
Does US really have 35% income tax? I don't really know, but sounds more like Sweden to me.
Skill? Seniority? Experience?
If it's in this broad range then yeah sure I totally get it.
Otherwise I have a hard time imagining someone with 100k worth of skill and experience still being just an "environment artist".
H1B doesn't really care what your title within a company necessarily is, just that you were hired based on those particular skills.
You can't possibly think all environment artists create the same quality art? And that someone who is just out of school has the same knowledge that someone who has been working for 5-10 years has?
At Naughty Dog we don't have the title of senior roles. Everyone, even the leads are just "Environment Artist" or "Texture Artist" and yet so many of the people here could be leads at other studios.
Well, there are international students studying at (and graduating from) US schools and getting hired by studios like Dreamworks.
But yeah, you still have to be good to get hired plus getting the visa.
It's cool to see too how much EA is paying it's contractors on an hourly basis. I haven't see data of artists getting paid hourly just coders, but surprisingly they're not stratospheric like you'd expect (I saw rates under $50/hr).
Absolutely not, man. But you have the naughty dog guys doing it for 75 for example and they are are in cali with a higher cost of living compared to most places. And they keep getting the "best graphics" awards with every release.
Microsoft does not yet pays it's artists 25k more.
For that amount of money they could afford the best of the best, but they are not that famous for their visuals. Seems weird.
Great point albeit it gets pretty confusing trying to compare things objectively then:) and makes it even more weird that microsoft should pay 25k more, 'cause you don't see far superior art coming from them
After every degree achieved you get a year to work its called OPT (You get more if it is engineering or something). That is how most international people out of school that are very good will land a job. After that time, most will end up having to leave.
As far as immigration is concerned they only see experience and education, they don't see that one has a really good portfolio or is a better artist/programmer etc.
Though there is a slight wiggle room for those who can knock one out of the park. Especially in DW kind of contests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa
They mention Nobel Prize as an example of award, so I doubt DW qualifies.
Plus most videogame and film awards tend to be given to a studio as a collective, or an effects house, where the top brass usually takes credit anyway, which is the nature of the business.
It does beg the question as to what sort of award would qualify a game artist.
Your logic is a bit half-baked here, you're making conclusions based on completely arbitrary assumptions and subjective views on quality.
What if the MS artist who makes 25% extra does the work in half the time? What if he has 10 years more experience? There are countless reasons for pay to vary, to sit and go "well project A looks better than project B so the artists on project A should be paid more".... it's just not how the world works.
Fact of the matter is you have nowhere near enough information to make any sort of statement on who should be paid what and how under/overpaid they are for their work.
Now, if we get some people on here from HR and Accounting at MS and Naughty dog, there would be an interesting discussion to be had.
Makes sense. The guy/gal who's now getting six figures was probably getting significantly less the previous year(s) in the same studio. But every year they're on h1 status their income is still added into the stats.
There are a lot of hard and soft reasons why a particular outlier might exist, and trying to guess why they are how they are is a waste of time.
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fslipgatecentral.livejournal.com%2F30671.html&act=url
Sure. We don't have that kind of information around here. And that is exactly why we can hold a half-baked discussion on the subject.)
Tbh I didn't even check the actual figures on the website so I'm just working with what PredatorGSR said.
And surely if we are talking about a single particular person who was hired for that kind of money I can easily imagine it so.
I somehow assumed that we were talking about an averaged amount per company. No one said it was this way or the other, but it's probably the other so it must be my bad. I never meant to discuss why a particular person get payed this or that. That's definitely moot. Sorry.
Well it's cool to know that DW counts as that sort of thing :P I wonder how they keep track of stuff like that though, like what is legitimate and what isn't.