Deccan.. you said.. "Just out of curiosity, is that a fairly typical wage for an American working in the gaming industry?"
The nunber was plucked out of the air, it in no way reflects 'actual' wages. However, I was making 25k (cdn) back during that scenario I mentionned. Today I know of several people working at gamming companies that are 'on salary' and the wages range from 24 to 38k/year (for my artist friends) I don't know about programmers, but I figure they probably get more just because 'programming' is percieved as 'harder' work. (I'm still not convinced of that.) Many companies work at just slightly above minimum wage for 'salaried' employees. I heard that many artists and programmers nowadays are only getting between 16 and 20k /year. Much of the industry has gone through many 'restructuring' and have been forced to downscale development costs. This in turn has lowered the agerage salary of the grunts in the industry.
Think of it, if a project has an in-house (salaried) dev-team of say 20 people, at 25k/year and it takes a year and a half to produce the product, that means that the dev cost for the project is $750,000 and this does not take into account management, marketing, or any other 'misc' people that are not part of the actual 'product dev-team'
When you take a company with larger salaries and larger dev-teams you can easilly see how games have gotten very expensive to produce nowadays. That is a big reason that many development houses are going belly up. In 10 or so years, the only developers that will be left will be indipendant (small) Groups of programmers and artists. Working under 'contracts' rather than being salaried.
anyway, I'm babbling, nuf said. Cheers!
Re: OT: 2005 Games
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