Survey determines average U.S. game developer income

Your right all those commercials for Carnival Games proves your point. Only the Core by games from word of mouth.

"If that were true, do you really think game companies would spend millions, if not billions on developing these ads? "

Yes I do, they pay the least important people the biggest salaries.

For the most part, that has been due to marketing budget though (IE marketing doesn't even exist) rather than marketing quality.

Gears 1 is really the one game that sticks out as getting a HUGE boost from its marketing department. Aside from that (the original Mad World trailer) there hasn't been a whole lot to distinguish one from the other aside from money spent to get more TV ads and whatnot.

Since I have a subscription to Game Developer magazine (they seem to just give me the magazine for free for some reason), I looked at the source and saw that the survey doesn't take into account hours worked, just as you said. I can now more easily understand how QA people can make nearly $40k. They work far too many hours.

Many of my friends are former QA testers, a coworker of mine was a tester, and I worked for two companies as QA tester too. None of us can report any wage higher than $13/hr during our tester days. So we couldn't figure out how this 40k number could be true. But factoring in all the crappy overtime, it seems a lot more feasible.

I really don't think anyone should be looking for a tester job. The pay is crap, the hours are crap, and the job isn't fun. My current job is basically the same amount of difficulty, but with twice the pay. There's just not much point to being a tester.

I wonder how much the allure of being a game developer is costing these guys money. That is, so many people want to be that dude that makes videogames that the companies can afford to pay them much less than they would for a similar job not related to gaming.

The game industry is not a place to make money for those types of jobs.

According to the survey data, a Southern US QA tester makes $28,214, while a Western US QA tester makes $41,591.

In related news... my EA tester friend says that EA Redwood Shores (the headquarters of the company) has moved a great deal of its QA department to Argentina. Hopefully the Argentines will make a nice wage in the deal.