Jester David
Hero
And so do Crawford and Mearls. So the wage is probably enough to support kids. And being able to support the basic needs of your family is kinda the definition of "livable".
WOTC is hiring a new Game Designer for D&D
Hasbro pays just fine.
Parmandur
Book-Friend
Is it normal to not list a salary range in this kind of job advert? Seems odd to me.
Talking of which...
How many regular posters here get paid less than Mearls & Crawford?
Mearls owns a house in the Seattle area. I'm sure the pay is competitive.
If they do pay a living wage that's great. That's not what I'd heard elsewhere. The only number I can recall was from about 10 years ago, and it was a WoTC games designer making ca $35,000, which didn't seem very livable to me. Also the comments I saw recently on a rate-your-employer website for WoTC included frequent comments about not getting paid enough to live on, being dependent on partner's income.
Jester David
Hero
Ten years is a long time and a lot of inflation. It'd be closer to $41,000 now. Assuming the money they paid D&D designers and developers at the tail end of 4e is the same as they're paying at the height of 5e.
Link?
Okay, being a game designer is not going to be a highly lucrative job. It's not up there with lawyer or doctor. The question is: does a job that makes you happy and that you enjoy doing worth making less money? How much is your happiness and enjoying your work worth?
Because any amount of money above the minimum doesn't necessarily buy you happiness. It buys you stuff. And stuff is nice. I love my stuff. But I'd rather have less stuff and have a job I didn't hate.
A big thing extra money can do -- if you can provide the discipline not to buy stuff -- is to buy your way out of wage-slavery for good. Squirrel the excess away and soon you find you've accumulated enough that you can stop working entirely and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to what you would achieve labouring at a lower-paying but more comfortable career.
I think it was Chris Perkins making $32-35,000 and it was more at the start of 4e era. $41K doesn't seem much to me, and I consider myself an underpaid academic.
Any games designer is likely to be college educated and have student loan debts, while Seattle is not a cheap city.Edit: However a Google search just turned up this; $75K looks wholly respectable. It does bug me if games designers are earning much less than the non-creatives but c'est la vie I guess.
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Sadras
Legend
Gawd yes!
bedir than
Full Moon Storyteller
Is it normal to not list a salary range in this kind of job advert? Seems odd to me.
Talking of which...
How many regular posters here get paid less than Mearls & Crawford?
In the entertainment business (games, music, movies, tv, sports) most jobs don't list salaries. You will not be paid what you are worth because there are 1000s of people who will accept less to do the job. These are prestige gigs that are not about money, but about experience.
OK thanks for the heads-up.
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