Want to make games? Drop out now!

[alexxkay]

Game Developer Magazine's latest issue features the results of their annual salary survey. Although there are caveats involved with any set of self-reported data, I think at least the relationships between different subsets of data are likely to be accurate. And I noticed something that surprised me in the table "Average Salary by Education and Discipline".

In all disciplines, those who completed "Some College" make significantly *more* than those who completed a Bachelor's Degree. Those who went on to "Some Graduate" made even *less* than those with Bachelor's.

Actually *completing* a Master's Degree gets you a salary roughly comparable to "Some College", though in some disciplines it's a bit less, in some a bit more. In none is it *enough* more to suggest being worth the investment.

At the Doctoral level, only Programmers reported anything. "Some Doctoral" makes more money than "Some College" -- but an actual Doctorate makes *less*.

So, if you're a college student who wants a successful career in the games industry, apparently the best thing you can do is drop out!

Comments

[jducoeur]

An additional bit of "correlation != causation": I suspect that this may be pure correlation based on *passion* more than anything else.

Consider -- one thing I've noticed (the hard way) is that the game industry demands and rewards enormous passion for the business. To be successful, you have to be rather driven.

Now think about how that correlates with a degree. The people with the most drive to *win* in this industry and precisely the ones most likely to pursue it *instead* of a degree. The ones who pause to get the degree, on the flip side, are less likely to be quite as driven.

So this suggests that there isn't necessarily a causal relationship in either direction. Instead, both phenomena might be caused by the degree of passion to be in games *now*.

It's also worth noting that a degree matters even less in games than in most software, precisely because the programming is more challenging and up-to-the-minute. While the theoretical grounding is useful, it's *much* more important to be a technical self-starter with a love for self-education. The stuff I learned in college was at best marginally useful at LG, because the field had moved way on since then. Even for a recent graduate, I would expect this to be true: academic programs tend to be a little behind the times, and you pretty much have to be on the bleeding edge to be a good game programmer...