Brit

> "We were not a fan of the publisher model before, because it just covers development and we never see royalties no matter how good the game goes,"

Sounds like he needs to explore more publishing options. I had a game publisher. I got paid by royalties. If you're going to expect the game publisher to pay for all of the development upfront and take the risk of the game not doing well, then, yeah, you'll get a worse deal on the backend.

@jessej07 It's a little confusing because I'm referring to the "2011 survey" as in "the survey numbers revealed in April 2011" but it covers 2010. I should've been clearer when I wrote that. You can just google and find articles about the earlier numbers.

@BritC Oops. I meant to write "2009", "2010", and "2011" surveys.

By the way, I'm always shocked by the numbers I see for game developers and developers in general since I work in the industry and have never earned that much. I wonder if these are skewed by San Francisco and New York where the cost of living is much higher. I also wonder what the average number of hours worked per week is for game developers.

Additionally, I noticed that much of the salary gains were earning-back declines in salary seen in 2009.

The 2009 survey had "an average American game industry salary in 2008 of $79,000", " programmers .. an average annual salary of $85,024.".

The 2010 survey had ""an average American game industry salary in 2008 of $75,573", " programmers .. an average annual salary of $80,320."

The 2010 survey had ""an average American game industry salary in 2008 of $80,817", " programmers .. an average annual salary of $85,733."

Compared to 2008, developer salaries over the past two years have increased by between 0.5% and 1.0% per year (i.e. less than inflation).

> "Indie developers saw a year-to-year increase of around $6,000, bringing their average wages up to $26,780"

What happens if you remove Notch from the Indie developer pool? :)

@Hivetyrant As an indie-game developer who recently went bankrupt and will spend the next few years digging myself out of debt, I actually find these stories to be depressing. It feels more like my industry is like a casino or lottery. Lots of losers and a handful of big winners. It sucks.

Reminded me of Nox. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGbJvbDMEf8

@Covnam Isn't one cent a minimum? I'm being a little tongue in cheek, but shouldn't "pay what you want" include paying nothing?

@thisredengine Yeah, you're right. In World of Goo's original "pay what you want" promotion, they had 30% of their buyers pay 1 cent. They also said that payments less than 30 cents end up going entirely to PayPal. So, a lot of people ended up paying money to PayPal and none of their money went to the developers or the charities.

A minimum of even a dollar would be in improvement.

@Unvrfd If he's going to resell them, then he needs to have the ownership of one thousand copies. Making a thousand copies of one purchase is copyright infringement and could land him in court. Most people tend to look down on for-profit piracy.