game-developer-magazine posts

Did you know that there were awards given out for game middleware software? Yep, we didn't know that either. However, Game Developer magazine has just announced the winners of their Front Line Awards that honor the software that game developers use to make their game titles.

This year the awards named the Unreal Engine to their hall of fame. Epic Games' game graphics engine has gone through three major incarnations and has been used for hundreds of games and applications over the years. Here is the complete list of award winners:

Hall of Fame: Unreal Engine/Epic Games

Art Tool: Photoshop CS3/Adobe

Audio Tool: FMOD/Firelight Technologies Pty, Ltd

Middleware: Havok Physics/Havok

Engine: Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.7.1/GarageGames

Programming Tool: Visual Studio 2008/ Microsoft

Book: "The Art of Game Design' by Jesse Schell/ Elsevier

In an article entitled "Cahiers Des Jeux -- the Press/Developer Relationship" on Gamasutra.com, Game Developer magazine Editor-in-Chief Brandon Sheffield weighed in on the nature of games journalism. As an opinion piece, it serves to illustrate his thoughts quite well, but as with the very reviews he seems to deride, it reveals a few misleading statements that ought to be examined in a positive light.

To begin, Sheffield mentions review scores, those ambiguous and seemingly arbitrary measurements of a game's value. He's right -- a numerical score indicates almost nothing at all to a reader who hasn't read the text of the actual review. In many cases, the review itself argues in favor of a higher score than what is given. He goes on to note that developers do respect journalists, regardless of the "myriad other misunderstandings" inherent in the system. He sidesteps the idea that people do in fact read reviews to influence their purchases, but that this has less to do with said reviews being "actual arbiters of quality" as it does these reviews having perceived quality. This is an important point.

Do you want to make your living in the game industry? The staff at Game Developer magazine have made that a little easier to figure out with their new 2007 survey of salaries of all the positions you could imagine working for in PC and video games. While salaries tend to vary widely depending on the kind of work, the average salary for 2007 was recorded to be $73,600 (up just a tiny bit from 2006's survey average of $73,316).

The press release announcing the summary of the new survey (you have to pay $2,995 for the full report) states that programmers get the highest salaries of anyone directly related to game development (business executives in the industry get more money on average). Programmers tend to be highly educated and get an annual average salary of $83,383. Production members (which according to the survey seems to be more open to women than any other job category) have an annual average salary of $78,716. The survey goes on to list average salaries of people who create the art, audio and design portions of games. As expected, the money for quality assurance testers tends to be low compared to the rest of the industry; they get $39,063 for an annual average salary. QA leads with more than six years experience, seem to get salaries that are much higher. The survey lists them as getting $70,568.