[psykotic]

I'm not using my own salary history as a benchmark. The IGDA salary surveys and my exposure to a range of developers seem to bear out my remarks. As for how I know salaries outside of public surveys, I am on a private forum where people talk about both their own salaries anonymously and what their companies typically offer when hiring.

I appended a paragraph to the original post explaining the effect of coolness on first-job salaries. I do think it plays a role there. Companies like EA are notorious for using fresh graduates as a revolving source of underpaid labor. As for long hours, my impression (here I have no survey data) is that it's become much rarer.

I think what happened economically is that by the early to mid 2000s, the main technical challenges of game development had almost nothing to do with anything specific to games. Compare that to the impression of game development you might have gotten from reading Abrash's articles on Quake. Because of that, good game programmers were able to easily get jobs outside of games, and good non-game programmers were able to quickly get up to speed on gamedev specifics. Hence wages equalized. That also explains why wages for designer and artists are still relatively lower.

[sillysaurus3]

Thank you for your insight. I'm trying to track down the surveys you mention. Is this one? http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/1108/game_developer_...

It's from 2012. Average salary for devs with less than 3 years experience: $66,116. The average for 6+ years experience is $103,000.

Here's a survey from 2001 with 1,801 datapoints: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010715/Salary_Survey_200...

Average salary in 2001 for the same position: about $55,000. For those with 6+ years, it was about $70,000.

It seems like a webdev outside the Valley who has 6+ years experience should be making more than $103,000.

If those surveys are to be trusted, it sounds like your $85k starting salary was about 50% higher than average at the time.

[psykotic]

From what I know, the three major salary surveys are from IGDA, Developer and GDMag (now defunct). Here's the summary of GDMag's 2012 survey: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/189893/Industry_in_flux_W...

It puts the US average at $84,337. The 2012 averages I can find for web developers are significantly less than that ($60,000-80,000). Part of the problem with these comparisons is that "web developer" is a much wider category.

> It seems like a webdev outside the Valley who has 6+ years experience should be making more than $103,000.

I don't see why, unless you are in a special high-demand bracket of web development. That's a very respectable salary in most areas!