Hello Game Dev Net community,
You may have read that the Gamasutra industry salary survey came out last week.
The results were a bit.....perplexing. Specifically, it would seem that "audio" salaries are higher than "programmer" salaries. What's with that?
This anomalous result is actually for a couple of reasons
- The survey received relatively few audio responses (this was mentioned in the survey report). Low response numbers mean low survey accuracy.
- The survey is designed to track salaried employees-- But much of the work in music and sound is done by freelancers/contractors
- The survey is sent to the GDC Attendee mailing list. This biases the results to those who attendeed GDC, which tend to be the most senior audio people. ("Low man on the totem pole" doesn't get sent to GDC)
To get some results more meaningful to our industry, I've created a brief (13 questions only) survey about contracts in game music and sound. If you have a moment and have worked in the game industry professionally in the past 12 months, please consider taking the survey about the last game that you worked on.
Please only take the survey about a game that you worked on in a professional capacity--i.e. you got paid for, and please try to be as accurate as possible.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GameAudioContractSurvey
I'll be posting the analysis and results of the survey sometime next week at www.GameSoundCon.com
Thank you!
Brian Schmidt
