CrystalShadow said:
Lol. Do you have any idea of the skill disparity between a programmer and a game designer? Code monkeys? Honestly, it sickens me how insulting someone can be about such a complex and difficult task...
It takes years upon years to become a good programmer, and games programmers are of nessesity among the highest skilled of any kind of programmer, on average; while a game designer is essentially anyone that can come up with a half-decent idea...
Wages are based on supply and demand, and I can tell you from personal experience; People with the skills to program games are outnumbered at least 3 to 1 by people that think they can design games, and worse yet, a typical project needs more programmers than it does designers.
Aside from which, if you don't pay them enough, a programmer is more than capable of getting a job in a non-gaming capacity, while a game designer often has few skills that are in particularly high demand anywhere else.
A good idea is worthless if you can't get it implemented, after all.
End result? The demand for programmers far outstrips that for game designers, and it probably always will.
On that basis, the relative wages should be no surprise whatsoever.
I do understand, very very well, how difficult it is to be a good programmer, and I do understand how much more difficult than almost any other kind of programming the art of coding games is. There's a wide range of skill and expertise within "programming". It's a very broad term. It surprises me that the AVERAGE, not the top, but the AVERAGE pay would be almost $100k USD.
The people who engineer the program are the ones who should be paid the most, within the programming area. It depends on the execution of the job, and how much freedom the coder gets, but in the worst case, they're handed pseudocode and told to make it real. That's not worth $90,000/pa, it's worth maybe half of that. Of course, flipside, you tell them to code, say, a new weapon, or something, and if they do it well with only design specs, then they deserve their salaries as above without question.
What I was trying to point out is that game designers have much greater an effect on the direction of the games, the mechanics included, etc, whereas a programmer will likely have an effect on the technical problems, not the mechanical ones. I find that if a game exhibits technical problems with excellent mechanics, I'll bear with it, but if it's technically excellent with poor gameplay, I'll drop it and leave. Or I'll refuse to buy after playing the demo. Gaming is by no means the result of one person, at least anymore, but I find that I care a lot more about the results of the designer's work than the programmer's.
With regards to numbers, I bet you that while programmers are indeed outnumbered by people who think they can design games by a large margin, the same is true for people who can design good, cohesive games and people who think they can code.
That one requires less training and expertise to be a game designer is known to me. To do it well requires a lot of work, testing, knowledge, and so on, but probably not a degree in computer science. To be a programmer also requires a lot of time, experience, testing, and hard work, for sure. But to have less than half the salary with a much greater responsibility for final product quality, in my opinion, is disproportionate.
