- Yearly Reviews
- How they tend to work
- Expectations
- Salary
- Negotiating pay
- Yearly growth
- Questions
- Resources for pay
Generally the fastest way to increase salary is to jump to a studio that will pay you more for your value. Be careful with this. Yes, you will get more pay but have you learned anything other then how to jump studios? This turn into a habit that the person cannot turn off as well. Finishing a project is always good for you on the CV unless.
Yearly Reviews
How they tend to work
Take everything that you did that year as documented by you and your lead and review them to goals or ideals by you, your lead, and the company. How do you fit in and are you growing in the direction of your own values as well as those of the company.
Expectations
There should be no surprises on something you failed to achieve or live up to since those should be covered in 1on1s. This gives you time to work on issue points and micro targets to address before the year review. Work with your lead to build this type of back and forth.
Those expectations are different as you go from AAA to AA or Indie.
There might not be a system at all for career development or even pay scales. Also, in some studios the lead is the line manager, as in salary-setting manager, and in some studios they use a matrix model where there’s a lead and an official line manager who is removed from the daily work. There are pros and cons with this for sure. The advantage is that there is less red tape to go through, but the biggest disadvantage is that you also lack a validated and “objective” system. Many small studios seem to be all over the place when it comes to careers and compensation.
Salary
Negotiating pay
Needs to be expanded on.
Yearly growth
Needs to be expanded on.
Matching inflation is usually rarely/barely met and in our current climate (2023), there are even fewer who will.
Questions
Q. Have you experienced problems of early growth in yearly reviews?
A. These experiences are very common across the board. They are usually brought up by people early on in joining the industry. Id be curious just for my own understanding how long you have been at the company.
Every studio will have there own way of doing yearly reviews but one thing should be common across them all. Its a year of the review or progress from that year. Studios tend to also tie this review somehow to how the next year salary is projected.
Pay adjustments from my experience are within percentages and not easily negotiable. Also its important to note that each field has its own brackets or matrix for how the developers growth finically scales. For example a Level or Environment Artist will scale differently then say a Engine Programmer.
What you can do is push for higher percentages through showing your value to the project and studio through tracked achievements. This is where Yearly goals between you and the lead are important. If i do these 5 things and the lead says yeah you did those, that gives you more ammunition to push that 2% to a 4% or more.
Resources for pay
Global GameDev Salaries 2021-2022