Gamedev Salary Pulse Survey Is Back for Its 5th Edition: Add Your Voice

Five editions in, the games industry trends survey is open again. It is anonymous and takes about five to seven minutes. What you put in becomes a free annual report on the state of the games industry: pay, job security, AI sentiment, remote policies, and where the work is actually moving.

Who Should Fill It In?

Anyone currently working in the games industry, in any discipline and at any level. That includes people employed at studios, people working on contract or B2B arrangements, freelancers, and anyone currently between roles who was working in games recently.

It particularly helps if you are in a discipline or region that tends to be under-represented in salary surveys. Audio, narrative, QA, data, and HR are consistently smaller samples than engineering and art, which means the numbers for those roles are less precise than they could be. If that is you, your response counts for more than most.

The same goes for regions outside the usual reporting. Salary data in games skews heavily toward a handful of markets, and every response from somewhere less covered makes the regional picture more honest.

Why Take Part in the Gamedev Salary Pulse?

It is not only about salaries

The name is a little modest. Salary is the anchor, and it is the thing people look up first, but the report has grown into something closer to an annual read on the state of the industry from the inside.

It covers how secure people actually feel in their jobs, how the layoff cycle has moved people between studios, what developers genuinely think about AI rather than what the discourse says they think, whether remote and hybrid arrangements have settled or are quietly reversing, how employment is structured across markets, which disciplines are growing and which are thinning, how old the industry is getting, and how many people are quietly open to leaving.

Those are questions the industry argues about constantly, usually with anecdote rather than evidence. This is one of the few places they get answered with numbers from the people living them.

It makes the data better for everyone, including you

Where salary is concerned, the information gap in games is unusually wide. Ranges are often absent from job postings, studios set bands against last year’s offers rather than current market data, and candidates negotiate without knowing what a role is worth.

A larger, more representative dataset fixes that for everyone in the sample. The more responses we gather, the more granular the report becomes, which means useful breakdowns by discipline, seniority, and region rather than broad averages that describe nobody.

It is anonymous

No name, no logging in, no account. We are not building a mailing list out of this, and there is no follow-up unless you ask for one. If you would like a heads-up when the report is published, you can opt in at the end and leave an email address, but that is entirely optional and these are processed separately from your answers. The survey is designed so that nothing in it identifies you or your studio.

Open access, no gatekeeping

The report is free to read. No paywall, no email capture, no form standing between you and the numbers. It is published for the industry to use, including by people who never filled in the survey and including by other recruiters.

That is deliberate. Salary data behind a signup wall mostly serves whoever collects the emails. Salary data in the open serves the people negotiating with it.

And we donate for every response

For every completed response, we donate $1 to trusted pet rescue organisations. It is a small thing attached to a small ask, and animal welfare is one of our core values.

Who Is Behind Gamedev Salary Pulse?

8Bit Games Industry Recruitment is an international recruitment partner working exclusively in game development. Since 2015 we have worked with more than 120 studios worldwide as a fully remote team.

We run the Gamedev Salary Pulse because the information gap in this industry is real and because we would rather negotiate against shared data than against guesswork. Five editions in, it has also become something more useful than a single year’s snapshot: with several years behind it, the report shows direction as well as position, which is how you can see things like AI anxiety climbing while actual job losses to AI stay low. Our donations to pet rescue organisations reflect a standing commitment to animal welfare, which is one of our core values.

What Your Answers Did Last Year

It is easy to ask people to fill in a survey. It is harder to show them where their five minutes went, so here is what the last edition produced.

Nearly 1,200 game development professionals contributed, and the resulting report has been used by studios setting salary bands, by developers deciding whether an offer was fair, and across our own writing whenever a claim needed real numbers behind it rather than an estimate.

Some of what that data revealed:

Each of those says something the industry was arguing about without evidence.

On AI, the interesting part is the gap. The share of people who feel very much threatened by AI came close to doubling in a single year. Meanwhile, among those who had actually lost a job, only 3% attributed it to AI. Fear and experience are moving at completely different speeds. You only find that out by asking both questions of the same people.

On retention, 41.9% is an uncomfortable number for studios. Not people actively job hunting, people with jobs who are quietly browsing anyway. That is roughly two in five of the team. It reframes retention from something you notice when a resignation lands into something already underway in the background.

And 26.5% is the involuntary half of the same story. Over a quarter of respondents had changed employers at least once in three years because of mass layoffs, not because they went looking. Put that next to the 41.9% browsing and the 15% or so in active career transition, and the picture is of an industry where a majority of people are either moving, being moved, or keeping one eye on the exit. That is not a normal labour market, and it is worth measuring properly rather than inferring from headlines.

Beyond those headlines, the data also settled how far salaries diverge between Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Nordics, and North America, which disciplines are growing and which are contracting, how senior the industry has become relative to entry-level roles, and how remote and hybrid arrangements have actually settled rather than how they are described.

None of it exists unless people tell us.