Innogames names salaries for game developers
Junior developers at Innogames earn up to 58,000 euros: the Hamburg games company is one of the first studios in the industry to disclose salaries.
With more salary transparency, the Hamburg developer studio Innogames wants to attract specialists and convince developers to consider the games industry: Innogames was the first German games company to disclose the earning potential of developers.
In addition to developer salaries, Innogames provides information about the salaries of game designers, system administrators, artists, community managers, product managers, QA engineers and marketing employees. The lists apply to employees working in Germany.
Developer starting salary from 48,000 euros
Although the individual professional groups are divided into several levels, there are also quite large salary differences within these levels: Innogames estimates the salary of a regular developer at around 58,000 to 75,000 euros.
For this salary level, there is also the option of drawing a “transitional salary” of EUR 79,500. According to Innogames, such a transitional salary is given to employees who have not yet reached the next level of experience, but are “on the right track” and do “excellent work”. Accordingly, the salary range for regular developers at Innogames is over 20,000 euros, for team leads it is even 30,000 euros.
Salary ranges at Innogames (9 images)
In a recent study, the job platform Honeypot determined an average salary for developers in Germany of 68,996 euros. On average, women still earn less than men. According to the data from the platform, the salary difference between men and women when starting a career is around 5.3 percent, after six to eight years of experience it is still 1.5 percent.
“Salaries in the upper third”
(Image: Innogames)
“Salary transparency is a question of fairness – not only towards the employees, but also towards the applicants,” said Innogames co-founder Michael Zillmer. “I hope that other games companies will now also dare to take cover and thus further refute the still widespread prejudice that our industry pays badly. In fact, Innogames’ salaries are in the upper third of the German market.”
Among other things, Innogames hopes that the publication of its salary levels will result in lower dropout rates in the application process. It is also intended to attract talent that has not previously worked in the games industry. In addition, a signal should be sent to applicants that there is no gender pay gap to be feared at Innogames. “All in all, we expect a win-win-win situation for our company, for our employees and our applicants,” says Andreas Lieb, head of the Human Resources department at Innogames.
Salary information in job advertisements
In the future, Innogames wants to publish job advertisements directly with salary information. The salary tables are currently available for nine professional groups within the company. According to Innogames, such listings are only worthwhile if at least six employees work in a professional group.
In total, Innogames has around 430 employees in Germany, making it one of the largest local developer studios. Innogames is a subsidiary of the Swedish Modern Times Group and develops mobile games and browser games. The Hamburg studio’s portfolio includes titles such as “Elvenar” and “Forge of Empires”.
Companies in the video game industry rarely make their salaries public. In recent years, developers have repeatedly led the salary debate on their own initiative: in 2020, employees of Activision-Blizzard caused discussions with a voluntarily filled out salary table, last year employees compared their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag “gamedevpaidme”.
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