Quote: If you have created audio credited or uncredited, free or paid for games in the year 2008, I want to hear from you. Game Audio Survey is a not-for-profit information project that strives to inform the Game Industry about the Game Audio Marketplace, Culture, and Technology trends. However, before I can do that, I need your help in gathering data. On the website is a survey that can be completed in 5 minutes or less that needs your answers: Game Audio Survey Some of you have found my preliminary survey helpful with results like this: With your help we can explore our industry more deeply than ever before. Thanks for your time and please comment below your thoughts on this study. Additionally, if you would like to see cultural or technological trends studied--please post below with the kinds of surveys you would like to see me implement in the future.

Just wanted to remind everyone that today is the final day to take the Game Audio Market Survey. If you've taken it, great, if you haven't, for shame. Honestly, though, publicizing our rates and salaries in ways that, as individuals, we can't can open the doors for a more serious discussion about what is fair business in our industry. If you haven't yet taken the time to fill out the survey, please consider it, the survey only takes a few minutes and as tax day, I'm sure that all this information is handy or in ready recall. If you have, think about your friends who may not have heard of this survey--let them know that the deadline is fast approaching. We need as many respondents as we can get to ensure accurate demographics. Cheers, and thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of the survey thus far (and obviously to everyone who is planning on being supportive of the survey in the next 14 hours). Sincerely, - Dan Reynolds

Interesting to see people with my level experience are making about $2000 per minute.

If your experience level is 6 to 10 years, then you'll note that the highest reported income was $2000/min, that's most anyone reported making.

The average was more between $400 and $1050/min according to the preliminary survey.

Thanks so much for doing this survey Dan! I can't wait to read the official results!

Of course, man, though there is a lot to do with regards to statistics handling and organizing the data.

The depth of the survey is enormous and figuring out how the data relates is going to be quite a task. I hope to have something out this summer--though I might release the data in chapters (that's how big it is) with the happy side-effect of generating an ongoing discussion of our corning of the games industry.

Here's a short conversation I had with someone on the GAP mailing list about sound designer salaries:

Quote: Even? No, I had, if I recall, over 60% of the respondents reporting that they were in-house, and something like 30% of the respondents reporting that they worked freelance sound design with about a 12% overlap between the two.

Of the Freelance Sound Designers who also worked In-House last year, their In-house salary ranged between 3.9k to 80k with an average of about 49-50k. Within that same group, the reported Freelance Sound Design salaries for all of last year ranged from 85 measley dollars to 65k last year and averaged around 13-14k. Definitely shows that these cats are supplimenting their In-House income with side design work.

In total, from all of the freelance sound designers, the salary range was from 50 dollars to 365k last year with an average of about 23-24k--ouch for the freelancers.

About 94% of the In-House folks reported having to do In-House Sound Design tasks. Among them, their salaries ranged from that low-ball 3.9k to 150k with an average salary of around 63.4k.

Though, I should mention, as many have started to notice, "out-house" audio design is becoming popular in these hard times since overhead for a contracting company is nominal.

Like I said, these numbers are rough, and outliers and possibly erroneous responses need to be dealt with accordingly.