How Much Does a Gamedev Make? Apparently Up to $1 Million

A spreadsheet has been published on Twitter that summarizes the salaries of various positions in the video game industry. The record holder made over $1 million last year.

It's rather obvious that working on video games can bring a lot of profit, and a spreadsheet created by Eva Karr and Nicolaas VanMeerten, founders of GLITCH agency which supports small developers, proves it further. It summarizes anonymously submitted data on annual earnings in the video games industry. "Record holder" on the list is a creative director from the USA, who in 2020 earned more than a million dollars.

A link to Google Sheets, shared by Christer Kaitila, a developer who has worked on more than a hundred games, can be found here. The sheet, in addition to earnings, also includes find information about the country, gender, years of experience and the type of position on which the person worked. A total of 822 developers from around the world are listed. Karr also posted a short summary of the extensive spreadsheet on her Twitter.

In terms of occupation, engineers (186 people) made the bulk of the list, followed by artists (153 people) and producers (63). Ethnic and cultural groups were also summarized, with caucasians making up the largest number, about 72%, followed by about 13% of Asians and 4% of Hispanic descent.

Karr is currently collecting submissions for a new spreadsheet that will summarize 2021, and as she writes on Twitter, she has already collected over 400 entries in the last 12h.