The game industry has been carefully scrutinized by many recently for mistreatment of its workers in every way from personal to professional. A huge part of this has to do with proper compensation, longterm employment, and salaries, with salary complaints aimed at Bobby Kotick.
But not all of these complaints and concerned are just centered on how much executives in the game industry make, far from it. What most programmers and designers are most concerned with is, reasonably, their own salary. To try and help establish a standard for what pay should be, these employees have decided to be more open with each other.
This is why #GameDevPaidMe is currently trending on Twitter. The hashtag encourages employees in the videogame industry to share their salaries over the past several years, asking them to fully disclose what they were paid and the position they held for that year. This is not the first time the call has gone out for this sort of transperency has gone out and been answered by designers, project leads, and programmers in the gaming sphere, but it is no doubt resurfacing due to employees taking steps against injustice in the industry.
The salaries are not exactly jaw dropping, at least not to those within the industry or viewing it from the outside from more profitable positions. This makes the transperency something of a revelation, especially to many of the devs. Many express shock, not realizing prior to this sort of sharing how much (or how little) they were making, comparitively, for their efforts in video games. Ultimately, the hope is that sharing these salaries will encourage employees to ask for fair compensation, as Blizzard employees did last year.
For the most part game development companies, and few companies for that matter, are very open when it comes to finance, especially when it comes to rank and file employees. This is not always the case, as Nintendo revealed the average age and salaries of its employees last year. Then again, Nintendo, is always a bit of an outlier in the industry.
It has long been understood that creating video games is not usually a very profitable position for the creators, although it is very profitable for those running the production companies (if not always the dev compnaies). This makes situations like Sega cutting salaries and employees all the more tragic, something that is by no means limited to that company.