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

[londo.livejournal.com]

I'm a genius!

[dsrtao]

This suggests to me that people who saw an opportunity while they were in college or graduate school and ran after it are doing better than those who chose a "safe" course and stayed in school.

I would not construe it as advice to drop out without seeing such an opportunity dangling.

[mickeymao.livejournal.com]

It may also suggest that those with more education are less likely to stay in the industry long-term (cough, cough).

[dariusk.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that this is the case: people who have been in the industry longer probably never had a degree, as it was much more common to drop out of college in the '80s and early '90s to pursue a game career. (Nowadays, people tend to complete their degrees and then go into game development.)

Since the people who have more experience get paid more, and the people who have more experience dropped out of college, it looks like the people who dropped out of college get paid more. But they didn't control for things like experience. So there you have it.

[buzybee06.livejournal.com]

And here I am wondering if they took Student Loans in to consideration. The pay back by the time you are finished with your Doctoral must be outragous. That would put a chunk of your ready cash out of your paycheck.

[jamey1138.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it all speaks to me as a reinforcement of my existing thoughts on advanced degrees: Get them if you want one, or if your chosen career absolutely requires one, but mostly, because you want one. They're a luxury item for most owners...

That said, I should go work on my application for my master's degree... :) Neatly enough, the master's will act as "time served" towards my subsequent Ph.D, which is pretty nearly a prerequisite to where I want to be in 10 years (a professor in a high-end college of education). Also, my job (assuming I stay in this one) contractually promises to give me a significant pay bump once I have a master's. So it makes sense for me-- as *well* as being a luxury item!

[laurion]

As others have said, this indicates to me that a higher than expected number of game designers are starting their dreams while still in school. Either some number of the survey responses are from people who got lucky and dropped out, or got lucky, and might -currently- be in school (that qualifies as 'some', right?).

I seem to recall that in the late 90's, just before the tech bubble popped, it was a popular thing to drop out of school and start working for a game company.

[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...