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This year has been one of true maturation in the game industry, growing pains and all. To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, today more than ever the business of game development is business. The gulf between game development's garage roots and Wall Street's unrelenting demands is widening. Consolidation has been rampant, bringing big paydays to some and leaving others out in the cold. Uncertainty about the future, both technological with regard to future consoles, and professional with regard to job security, has been a dominant theme.
Still, at the heart of every underpraised triumph and big-budget blockbuster alike are the individual men and women who conjure game magic from the alchemy of programming, art, design, audio, and production support. Now in its third year, Game Developer's annual salary survey examines how such efforts translate into salaries and perks for thousands of U.S. game developers.
With the help of research firm Audience Insights, we sent e-mail invitations to Game Developer magazine subscribers. Game Developers Conference 2003 attendees, and Gamasutra.com members in October 2003, asking them to participate in our annual salary survey, and we received 4,508 unique responses worldwide.
Not all respondents provided sufficient compensation information to be included in the findings. We also excluded cases where the compensation was given at less than $10,000 or greater than $300,000, or where there was text entered that did not readily correspond to a compensation figure. We further excluded records missing key demographic and classification information. As this article reports U.S. compensation only, we also eliminated the approximately 1.400 non-U.S. respondents, bringing the total sample reflected in the compensation data presented in the following pages to 2,740.
The sample represented in our salary survey can be projected to the game developer community with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 1.8 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. That means we can say with 95 percent certainty that the aggregate statistics reported would stay consistent, within the margin of error, across the entire population.
Every year the game industry garners more attention from fans and speculators alike. Analysts are no longer projecting the gangbusters growth rates of the past few years, but many outside the industry, from film and music especially, are looking for ways to leverage its cross-media moneymaking potential....