European Game Workers Want More Equality, Money and Protection
– 5 min read
In a big survey of 1,832 participants, job agencies InGame Job and Values Value collected anonymous data from game workers over all of Europe. The numbers on salary, satisfaction and discrimination aren’t positive, but they show what needs to improve.
This report presents the results of a targeted survey conducted in the European video games industry. The initiative is a collaboration between Values Value and InGame Job, with the aim of uncovering key insights regarding trends in wages, job satisfaction, and career growth. The research was conducted anonymously from March to June 2024. A total of 1,832 respondents from 57 countries worldwide participated in the study. The data was cleansed of invalid and anomalous salary responses. Only the European region was analysed in order to represent valid data, leaving 1,387 valid responses in two collections: EU+UK+Switzerland (CH) with 692 respondents and Non-EU with 695 answers.
Audience Portrait
More than half of respondents were established, long running games workers. 30 percent classified themselves as Senior workers, 29 percent as regular. 16 percent are team leads and about 12 percent are on the Head level or above. Only about 11 percent classified themselves on a starter level as trainees or juniors. 26 percent of respondents work in Art or Design, while 17 percent work in Game Design, about 15 percent in programming and nine percent in project management. Other significant answering groups were management with 7.3 percent, HR with 5.3 percent and QA with 4.4 percent.
Salary Data 2024
Salary obviously varies considerably over seniority levels, but also through work area. Generally it can be said that the EU+UK+CH salaries are significantly higher than the Non-EU salaries, especially on regular, non-senior levels, although the values are not cross-analysed with cost of living and spending power. The lowest regular salaries go to QA, Analytics and HR in Non-EU countries and QA in the EU+UK+CH countries. On a senior level, the ranking gets mixed up: Top-level management and company founders notwithstanding, the biggest salaries go to analysts in the EU, UK and Switzerland and to programmers and project managers. The seniors with the lowest salaries are still the ones in HR and QA.
Low Satisfaction With Current Salary
The report also asked respondents to rate their income satisfaction on a five-point scale. Over both regions combined, the salary satisfaction is rather middling: On average, Juniors rate it 2.2 out of 5, Mid-level 2.9 out of 5, Seniors 3.6 out of 5. Most satisfied are Seniors Analysts and Project Managers as well as, unsurprisingly, Top-Managers. Least satisfied are QA Specialists among the Seniors and QA Specialists as well as Artists among the Juniors, again bringing up no surprises. A significant portion of respondents said they get additional benefits to their salary, at least. About 40 percent get an annual, monthly, quarter or project-based financial bonus, eight percent say they get stocks or stock options in the company. Only 8.4 percent of workers are in some way profiting from the continued success of the product they make, through royalties, a percentage of sales or others. 39.5 percent say they get no financial bonus at all.
Shocking numbers are revealed when it comes to social securities in the survey. Only 42 percent of workers get paid sick leave, a devastating 14 percent say they could get paid maternal leave if applicable. Just 10.9 percent say that they get paid extra for overtime. Non-financial perks also seem to not be ubiquitous. When it comes to mobility, only 16.8 percent say that home office is a possibility and only 22 percent got help relocating to their job, making changing to a new job in another city considerably harder. Positively, about 28.5 percent say their company paid for language classes and 12.7 percent said they had access to internal education.
These bonuses, especially the financial ones, have a huge connection to how loyal the employees feel towards their company. The survey adapts Net Promoter Score, a marketing tool measuring loyalty of customers, into Employer Net Promoter Score (eNPS) and finds that financial bonuses have a score of 57.1 eNPS, meaning that employees with a financial bonus feel 57.1 percent more connection to their company than those without. Sales percentages, royalty shares and even extra overtime payment for crunch phases appear to have similar effects, with eNPS scores between 36 and 43 points. Tanja Loktionova, Founder of Values Value, explains it like this: “The annual bonus has a profound influence on how engaged someone feels and how likely they are to recommend their company. Conversely, monthly bonuses don‘t have the same motivational impact as they potentially could. With time, employees become accustomed to them — they start seeing them as part of their regular pay, so if they suddenly don‘t receive them, it can lead to demotivation.”
Layoffs & Downtimes
Of course, in the current market climate, layoffs have also been topic of the survey. The most concerned about potential layoffs within the next year are workers in Localization and Sound Specialists, Artists, QA and Project Managers. Unsurprisingly, Trainees and Juniors are the most vulnerable and concerned. From the respondents, 18 percent of game developers were laid off during the last year. 25 percent overall say they suffer from a lack of job security, and 15 percent even say they either per- or received an unjust and unethical firing.
Discriminatory Experiences
The anonymous survey also left space for people to share their experience with discriminatory practices. The numbers are relevant: 31.6 percent, so almost of third of participants, said they had been discriminated over their gender. 17 percent said they had been discriminated against based on their country of origin, 16 percent because they did not spoke the language of their workplace country perfectly, seven percent specifically because of the colour of their skin. 21 they had been discriminated against because of their age, about four percent age because of their sexual orientation or a disability. 10.5 percent said they received discrimination because their status of education was perceived and treated as low.
Almost half of people said they have noticed gender discrimination at their workplace, just as 34 percent did age discrimination, 18 percent did regarding sexual orientating and 17 percent because of skin colour. 11 percent even said they had noticed people being bullied for being pregnant.
Discrimination remains a serious issue in the industry that has to be treated as such. As do health issues: A whopping 56 percent of participants say they have or had burnout due to their game job. 32.6 percent suffer from poor work-life balance. And sometimes, it‘s not the job, it‘s the colleagues, unfortunately. 32.4 percent say they suffer under one particularly toxic colleague, almost half of participants, namely 48 percent, say their place of work suffers from unprofessional or ineffective management. As can be gleaned in the salary numbers and how satisfied — or rather unsatisfied — people are on average, unfair distribution of rewards and bonuses is also a problem: About 30 percent say they suffer from this.
Overall, most participants of the survey are unsatisfied with their current working conditions in one way or another, be that because of discriminatory practices, lack of security or low salaries. With layoffs abound over the last two years, it‘s no surprise that life as a game worker is hard at the moment, even in the EU, where the salaries are comparably high and the workers rights are comparably good. If companies want to retain their talents, it would pay to lend an ear to the concerns their employees try to make heart.
You can find the full report here: https://ingamejob.com/https://valuesvalue.com/
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