The ugly side of the gaming industry rears its head again...

I recently read a very interesting article on Examiner.com that relates to the current salaries of game developers and why costs are increasing, I fully intended to pop the article on here for everyone to have a read but having gone back to Examiner.com the article had seemingly been removed, with a little bit of digging I discovered that the author of the article had been fired because developers spoke out and threatened to give Examiner.com the cold shoulder unless the guy was removed.

Here's the original article (reposted on a different site)

http://realgamernewz.com/14057/the-problem-with-the-gaming-industry-is-that-developers-make-too-much

It makes for an interesting read but what has happened since then has turned into a bit of a drama, here the guy has made a follow up article that goes into great detail about the practises that Developers and Publishers are using to keep themselves out if the limelight....

http://realgamernewz.com/14053/developer-backlash-over-salary-article-shows-the-schism-in-the-industry

A very stark contrast to what the general public usually see what do you guys make of this?

i think its mainly bollocks. the writer doesnt seem to have a grasp of what he wrote in his own article. in the second he criticises those that criticised him; they state that the "average" factors in the much larger salaries the assorted executives make and doesnt truly reflect what the average dev makes. he says he does. well, he doesnt. he talks about them driving sports cars, and thats about it. the article just talks about devs in general. when reading the first article, even i though "you're making sweeping generalisations here".

regardless, who cares? what salaries the police or fire folks are on is a different argument, and is one you blame politicians for, not game developers. there are a thousand industries out there where people working there-in earn silly money, and they tend to be quite skilled in their respective fields. someone like messi may earn millions for "just kicking a ball around", but, in his respective industry / profession, no-one can do what he does, and so he commands a high price for his services. and in games developement, if konami want to create something that looks as incredible (visually) as MGS5, then they are going to have to pay top dollar to secure the services of people with the necessary skills to do it.

this is what capitalism is all about .

to blame game prices soley on this is just ridiculous.

Developers are not overpaid. Fact. 
OK some might be - but methinks most are not. There are bent coppers and corrupt politicians too - which is somewhat worse I think.

Could you not say the same about sports people ? Footballers make too much money which is why its so much to go to a foozball game... 
And of course those damn rockstars making all that money and making the price of big gigs £70+..


What bollocks

Only read the first article, but there are a few bits and pieces that annoyed me about it. Firstly, the phrase "Former Epic Games design director Cliff Bleszinski even supported Microsoft’s previous Xbox One policy of restricting used games", as if he'd caught the man confessing to doing something wrong.

Then he goes on to complain about how they (with their very specialised field of knowledge) make more than public servants, saying this isn't fair since they aren't risking their lives. If that's his line of thought then there are much easier targets than game devs - professional sports players make those salaries look like a joke.

"What if these numbers were cut in half? This would only benefit gamers. Maybe games could go back to being $50 each. Maybe DLC and in-game items would be free to download." Then he suggests firing half the dev team or cutting their pay in half or both - he doesn't make it clear. Apparently if we pay devs a fraction of their current wage they will (for some reason) do extra work to give us free DLC. And the quality of games won't suffer.

On another note, it's worth pointing out that just giving the average salary is quite a misleading figure. It doesn't take into account that people working on games like cod will be earning a lot more (and there are quite a few of them) which will skew the figures. Nor does it consider the chances of finishing up a game then finding yourself looking for work for a year. When you isolate statistics it's quite easy to give a poor representation of reality. As one of my statistics lecturers liked to point out - the average human has one testicle and one ovary.

While I would usually tend to agree with Slowdog and absolutely most of the "workhorse" devs are well underpaid I do find it odd that the higher ups in the industry went to such great lengths to silence this guy, surely they would only do that if there is some scrap of truth here?