MCV Salary Survey – How we worked it out

A number of readers who turn to our site alone for all their latest industry news rather than the print edition of MCV as well have this morning asked for more details on how we collated data and calculated the averages for our 2009 Games Industry Salary Survey.

So, for those wondering/questioning:

Throughout last week we invited readers of MCVuk.com and our sister site Developmag.com to take part in a questionnaire we set up through an independent survey site.

528 people from across the games industry took part, with responses from those working in publishing, marketing, retail, PR, distribution, services, games media and games development.

Respondents included not just junior staff, but plenty of middle management, senior executives – and also MDs and European bosses.

The average industry salary was 31,655. We worked that out as a median average rather than a mean average. That is to say: we discounted, as the Office of National Statistics does, the extremely high and extremely low salaries (around 10 per cent of entries) to come up with our averages.

(Factor in the high-flyers and lower paid roles gives us higher averages, skewed by those individuals commanding senior roles at publishing, retail and development – hence why we shied away from the mean average and opted for median. FYI: with the higher wages factored in, the over all average was 37,823.)

In the survey 11 per cent of those taking part were women – and almost all of those respondents factored in to the median average we calculated above.

When the male and female salaries were factored out separately, the numbers were 33,260 for women versus 31,585 for men.

(Factor in the high-flyers and the numbers more closely align, at 37,291 for women and 32,877 for men.)

Female games industry staff are most commonly – according to our research – found in publishing, marketing, PR, retail and distribution/services. In terms of all those taking part who have development roles, women were just 6.9 per cent of that sector.