The consensus amongst my friends in game development is that it doesn't pay well for the amount of work they're doing, but it's what they enjoy doing so they're willing to tolerate it.
I should also mention that I am a bit of an anomaly - I'm an AngularJS expert, which seems to be in extremely high demand right now. I'm making around $160k (including stock compensation), and I may have even lowballed myself in salary negotiations.
To be honest, I had no idea such salaries were to be found in web dev, especially by specializing in popular JS frameworks. Thanks for sharing! I'd be curious to know your location and how much experience you have in Angular. [update: Oh, I see you posted 1.5 years in web dev.... wow, maybe I should reevaluate things]
It seems easy to justify paying well given that immediacy as opposed to a developer spending much more time/money optimizing GPU physics engines whose benefits would not be felt until the game was slightly better than its competition when it is released in a year.
Not necessarily total compensation but defiantly pay / hour.
I know your personal network is extremely large. If you have a lot of knowledge about the topic of gamedev salaries, I'd love to hear more. Since talking about salaries with colleagues is typically verboten, I'm curious how you collected your salary datapoints and what your sample size is.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of studios underpaying interns and programmers who are straight out of college, and regularly working people 60 or 80 hours a week. The anecdotal evidence fits my own personal experience, but perhaps my experience isn't representative of the whole industry; maybe I was just unlucky with my first couple studios.
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.
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.
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!
Your thinking must be stuck in the last century. By the time I entered the game industry 13 years ago, salaries were already on par with the software industry at large. My first full-time position was in 2003 and paid $85,000/year. Based on the numbers I've seen, game programmers currently earn significantly more than web developers with an equivalent amount of experience, despite the wage-inflationary effect of the VC money faucet.
The coolness factor used to play a greater role. I would say it still affects the supply side for QA, design and very entry-level positions in programming. For programmers with any level of competency and experience, its role is negligible.