Game developers sharing their salaries on Twitter

Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.

Now that I type this out I feel like I'm getting ripped off. BRB to demand a raise lol

Two of three things you've said here are true.

40 hours a week would guarantee you will not be effective.

Source: extensive discussion on Blind from FB employees and personally know 5 of them.

I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build stuff that scales to ridiculous levels.

It could be that better design will make these kinds of tools more accessible in the future.

I have to say however, that for engineers this is a massively good thing, both in terms of being able to work on lots of different stuff, and the compensation implications.

Careful, that's the FANG SWE ego speaking. What you describe isn't smartness but a willingness and patience to put up with lots of bloat.

Yes, their employees are making lot of money but where her money ends up going? A large part of that ends up paying rent in a region where there are many others making similar wages like you, and trying to outcompete you out of the best property you can choose to live.

Mostly people at headquarters or major offices get paid large salaries.

Executives make decisions where to open office, they've upphand on the info and have access to money, they buy the land in and around the region where office will be setup, where their employees will want to live.

That way half the money they pay ends right back into pocket of executives while FANG employees have statisfaction of making highest engineering wages.

It doesn't matter how much you make, if you still find yourself doing the same thing you were doing 5 years ago, perhaps, all that money didn't bring you much.

Now, there are exceptions to this where people saved up their salary and launched another business into huge success, yea those benefit the most. But most of the FANG employees will find themselves doing similar job after 5 years, so...

How exactly that extra money has changed your life? Are you driving Buggati or Bentley to your office? Do you have celebrities (male/female -depending on your orientation) caressing your hair while you hack on the code? Did you start a school to teach underprivileged kids?

As we can see most of these luxuries are still not available to majority FAANG employees regardless of how much they make. It's the money on paper, it doesn't buy much power. To have real power in society, having more money than your peers is not necessary - what you need is vastly more money and influence over other people.

Yes, and it needs super duper overqualified managers to understand that the super duper overqualified engineers actually are on to something with their suggestions.

Going back to lower income is really difficult, a lot of people bore themselves to death, dreaming of another job but stay just because they are well paid.

I’m not saying you are wrong, but how can you be sure that the « you » in ten years will have the willpower to follow your initial plan ? Good pay can sometimes be a trap.

As a kid I thought this included some obvious jobs, but now as an adult I realize a lot of professions are like this. Some of my doctor and lawyer friends have been dealt the worst hands of all.

Who defines "should be earning"? You?

Currently, we let the market determine it. It's fine to say you don't like that system, but that's the argument you should make, not "Big game companies are unfair". They're just playing the game the way we set it up.

Alternatively, you could maybe argue "I believe it is possible to make AAA games, pay high salaries, and actually make profits all at the same time", which would be an interesting take, and you could maybe explain how.

But saying "this is worker exploitation" is an uninspired, unproductive argument, IMO.

Besides, people trade compensation for all sorts of things: working at a nonprofit, working in their rural hometown. Why shouldn't problem domain be one of them?

I don't think the situation in tech is as black and white as "FAANG or QA tester". I have friends working at non-FAANG, non-gaming tech companies that seem fine with their salaries. Ticketmaster isn't as pristine a name but they seem to pay well.

Also, pedantic point: CDPR isn't American. I'd rather not get into the details on international salary because that's a whole other topic.

Game companies apparently have a meaningful differentiator, which is that working in a gaming context is something people actually value and are willing to give up potential compensation for.

There are so many people that want to work on games, and there are many positions where these people are capable of doing the job, that that is the situation in that industry.

There are a subset of game development positions that are just like FAANG: well paid, good working conditions, with high skill requirements. Just like FAANG is a subset of the software industry. As big as FAANG is, the median software developer is not that.

However, we need to stop shaming people for having different career priorities than our own, or assuming that people are only making these choices out of poor judgment. As the parent comment explained, some people really do prefer to engage in non-FAANG career paths for various reasons. For many, it's as simple as not being willing or able to relocate to a location with a FAANG office, as few FAANG companies offer remote positions even after COVID.

It's not, it's simply reality.

When deciding where to work, people don't just myopically look at the $ amount on the salary and nothing else. The company reputation, industry, culture etc. all have intrinsic value.

That's why SpaceX and some game dev's studios can get away with lower salaries than the market rate, because working there in itself has value for some people. And that's why Morgan Stanley and Facebook can't.

Good old supply and demand.

There is a lot of room between that your characterization.

Or you could just value things about work apart from salary. No need to shame people for going for not doing for the absolute highest paying job. You can try to do the best you can comp wise, but if you're only chasing money your whole life, it won't lead to much satisfaction and is generally bad advice

> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low

If this is good or bad is up to interpretation but some people actually enjoy different work cultures. I just joined Google after a ~5 year career at various startups, 2 of them YC backed through Work at a Startup & Bookface.

Google's culture and the culture at startups I've worked at are extremely different. Even the scales of your work are entirely different.

One of my first projects at Google was a "minor" change that resulted in migrating a majority of our users code. This involved a high level design doc, another doc sent to a committee, and for me to actually write the code which involved a series of reviews from my TL. What was essentially a very complex "find and replace" operation took ~2 weeks and it consumed a large percent of my bandwidth so I was operating at ~10% speed on other tasks while this was happening. After this we were planning another "medium sized" project and we were talking about timelines. I was confused about why we don't "just do it" and it turns out this task was going to be taking years.

This is a very different pace to what you get at a startup. At a previous job I rewrote how our entire CI worked. I essentially setup a demo, had another coworker I liked working with look at it and raise concerns, I fixed them, and then I pulled the trigger and migrated us a few days later. This also involved switching us from BitBucket to a self hosted Gitlab (which I setup runners, backups, etc for in ~1 day). We essentially changed the entire way we did development over a week because I decided it was the way to go, one other coworker agreed, and I executed on it and made it happen.

Another time we had a client identify a bug in a build we were going to ship them last minute. This was a "we're going to drop you as a client if this doesn't work" thing. Me and the same coworker had to fix this in 2 weeks or the company was screwed. I found this out as soon as I signed on to slack when my coworker who had been up till 6AM talking to our contact at the other company filled me in. I told him to go to bed and I'd start working on a fix. 1AM rolls around and he wakes up and I'm still working on a fix and feel like I've made no progress. I talk to the coworker and say "We're not going to make it, we're screwed". He tells me to go to bed and he'd work on it assuring me we'll be fine. I wake up the next day and he calls me saying we're screwed and I told him to catch some sleep and he'd I'd work on it and we'll be fine. We trade off like that every day for ~2 weeks including weekends. We pull off a fix using some new tech I was working on and by using standards we were pushing for others to use (unit testing, TDD, my automated deployment pipeline, duct tape, etc). It was exhausting and we both worked like 100hr/week for that time period. The next week the client was pleased, management was like "take whatever time you need that was amazing", and we went on our merry way. I basically vegged out for a week and, whenever I did do work, it was stuff I wanted to clean up anyway due to being bored.

You'd never get what happens at Google to happen at small company (years for a speculative project that may/may not help), and you'd never get what happens at small startups to happen at Google. Is that bad? No. Different people want different things. Honestly, the most fun I've had working in my career were those 3 weeks and working with that coworker. I still talk to him every week to catch up and about how our lives are going (he just bought a house, I'm moving, etc).

Obviously no one wants to work 100hr weeks but I want to work with people who care about the company, what we're doing, where we're going, and who are incentivized to do so (significant stock allocations, etc). I've been lucky enough to find a team like that at Google and at a few of the startups I've worked.

In short: it's not "bullshit propaganda" if you enjoy working with people who care, lack of bureaucracy, management structure, and actually like what you're building.

A bunch of people already responded to this, but I'm going to add my two cents anyway:

I currently make 6 low figures in a relatively boring but non-stressful systems administration job. The company is a dinosaur in Internet Years and has its idiosyncrasies but is ultimately a very decent place to work. My manager gives me my priorities and then gets out of my way to let me do my work. I work 40 hours a week, sometimes less. The company is mostly software devs and QA, so there's no such thing as on-call because nothing we manage needs 24x7 uptime. In 10 years, there have been about 3 times I've gotten a call on the weekend to help bring something back online.

I could very easily double my salary in under a year if I really buckled down and tried to pivot to DevOps role in some rapidly growing biotech or fintech (read: crypto) company instead. The tradeoffs being: 1) sacrificing basically all my free time and time with my family in order to adequately grok the ever-changing world of DevOps 2) that feeling of being out of my depth for 6 months to a year that comes with moving to a new company 3) almost certainly being part of an on-call rotation 4) taking a risk on a new company that may go bankrupt or get bought out a few years down the road, and so on.

I'm making an active choice to keep my stability and work/life balance while making what I consider to be a reasonable wage.

But it's not google telling you... it's literally the rank'n'file staff telling you that there's more important things than "money".

I'll not argue that many of the big players are garbage and are "anti-consumer"... but to dismiss how workers feel because you don't like some companies seems like you're missing the trees for the forest...

depends on the studio. Everyone focuses on the EA's, but most game studios aren't these huge billionaire ventures cranking out 12 games a year. It's certainly not the modern EA or Naughty Dog or Blizzard that give devs the low salary reputation.

I worked at one for 3 years, and it was <300 employees. I was still surprised at how much money they can bring in after talking to producers (spoiler: maybe it varies in other studios, but the most profitable games worked on weren't console games), but it was very clear that this wasn't a studio that could pay everyone even 100K/year and expect to be in business next year.

FWIW, the mobile games industry takes a different route. Unfortunately the media loves to shit on them while not being too hard on how the AAA movie-like industries operate.

some do, many don't. Not even all AAA companies have gone this route. Let alone all the mid sized studios out there contracted to make games. I'm sure Rockstar and Blizzard could, but the industry isn't just those two companies.

If those aren’t an option, then it might not be a lowball offer anymore. FAANG compensation is in an entirely separate category, from what I can tell.

And yeah, maybe the game devs being exploited think the situation is fine. The long hours for low pay is paid back by the intangibles of working on a game.

The point isn't that the dev made the choice, it's that it was ever framed as a choice in the first place. Many games studios are making billions in profits and absolutely could pay FAANG salaries and still turn profits.

So it's less about individual choices, and more about ensuring the workers are getting compensated fairly for the work they love doing.

A month is a lot for subpar pay.

Me: I worked 3 years, had a total of 6 weeks of crunch @50-55 hours/week, compensated 1.5x and with "free" dinner (AKA they actually complied to state law due to staying after 6PM). This was after literally cutting the content of the game in half due to client deadlines (A certain Big Tech company was not going to delay their product just because they set unreasonable deadlines to the studio). Attitude wise, no one liked it. Manager didn't pretend to be pleased with the discussions.

No extra vacation, but overall it wasn't one of those death grinds people talk on the internet about. I think both tales are valid, but of course one of them gets a lot more attention.

He remembers 1-2 times of 1-2 months of crunch of "not being expected to work _more_ than 60 hours". My bet is that this means people usually stayed _at least_ 60 hours during the crunch time due to social pressures created by the employees themselves. Sort of like "unlimited vacation" usually means that on average everyone takes less vacation, because they don't want to be the one with the most vacation taken. So to me this means the _lower_ bound is 60 hours, not the 50 you put as the average.

1-2 in this context tells me: it's definitely 2, if not more, but let's take the lower bound, i.e. 2. The following uses some generous rounding:

That's 4 months, so the 1/3 of the year you mentioned of 60 hour weeks. 4.33 weeks per month on average times 4 months is 17.3 weeks of at least 60 hour weeks =~ 1040 hours of work over a period of time that they should've worked ~690 hours. That's an extra of about 345 hours of work they did, which is a whopping 43 8-hour days. Even if after each of the crunches they got 2 weeks off, that's 20 days of vacation to compensate for 43 days of unpaid crunch time that also wreaked havoc with their actual lives.

Is my math off somewhere? Because otherwise as this was the lower bound from an idealized remembering of "the good old times" I'd call that exploitative.

I loved working on games! It wasn't bad at all doing this back in my 20s. You're doing something you love! With amazing people who also love games! I learned so much back in this period. I was able to tackle super hard challenges and really work on a huge variety of really interesting problems. Why would you not want to work extra hard if you have this kind of opportunity where you also love the work?

So you can say that 75k a year would be a decent pay in Europe, though maybe not for someone with a candidate degree in software engineering.

https://www.detdanskearbejdsmarked.dk/den-danske-model/portr...

You'll only get that tax rate at very high salaries and it's also of course marginal. In the UK the first 12k (~$17k) is entirely tax free for example. After that it's 20% up until you have earned 50k (~$70k). Only after that does the 40% tax kick in. So on a $75k salary, only $5k will be taxed at 40%.

For a $75k salary you would be paying just over 16% tax and 9% national insurance (i.e. pension) in the UK.

When I first started working as a SWE in the UK I worked out that my average tax rate was actually slightly lower than if I earned the same in California. If I was earning 2-3x more then the higher European taxes start to kick in.

It's even worse when you consider that the engines are generally already made, you only need developers to do what you could almost call glorified scripting compared to engine development.

I think Unity and Unreal probably have to pay their devs a reasonable salary. But having devs work in Unity or Unreal to produce a game is not really all that hard. That's kind of the point of Unity and Unreal.

That said, not all games are services yet so once the game ships anyone can make it to the chopping block.

Edit: obligatory "above is true in my experience, YMMV"

When you negotiate a higher salary, you are saying to your boss, look, I know I am creating more value for you than I'm getting as a wage, and I know you can't just swap me out with somebody else. You're actually making a demand that needs to be underwritten with a credible threat, no matter how politely you communicate that. You demand that the company realign your wage with your value (actually, you demand that they get closer, they of course never pay you your full value, or they don't make any money).

It's really that simple. You get what you have the power to get. It's not magic, and it's not all about the attitude or w/e.

Of course we are all still constrained by material reality! If you can't make the credible threat, you can't "just" negotiate. (Duh)

I'm pretty far from a FAANG uber-dev though.

2. Your willingness to walk away is, indeed, your primary leverage. Ongoing employment is a great way to have lots of leverage there — you can start filtering out offers at the "recruiter is emailing me" stage — otherwise, develop leverage by collecting multiple offers at once (lining up a variety of interviews so that they come in around the same time).

I see some people act like negotiating is an antagonistic game of chicken or something. In reality, it's just an amicable case of you finding your best options, communicating them clearly to everyone involved, then taking the best option. Think of it as more like an auction than some slick game of poker. What's wrong with this script?

Candidate: I'd like $150K. Comparable companies offer people with my experience $150K.

Hiring manager: We'll offer you $100K.

Candidate: I'll walk if you give me less than $140K.

Hiring manager: Ok... Bye?

Candidate: Okay, bye. [Takes a job earning $150k at one of those other companies]

In general, I think the benefits of negotiating don't go to the individual. They go to next individual/the market. You repeat that script a few times and the hiring manager goes to HR and says nobody's taking the job unless they pay more.

(If instead, you say "okay, fine I'll take $100k, I was bluffing" then that's what the next person is offered too.)

> "Just negotiate better!" OK, great... how?

My mental model is to approach it cooperatively. You're not trying to beat them. Talk about other data points if they say you're not being realistic, and talk about the reasons you're a better fit than they accounted for when you ask for more. They say they're better than the next company and you say you're better than the next candidate.

But most of all, just make sure you actually have that alternative you're willing to walk away for. Interview while you have a job. Time your interviews so that you have options while this conversation takes place.

YMMV. I've gotten like +10% from negotiating and +30% from walking away to take other offers, which should tell you the relative importance of each.

If you are putting the first number out you're already working from behind.

Company: We'll offer you 100K.

Candidate: I'm really excited about the role for xyz reasons and I liked meeting with (insert persons name here) because it allowed me to learn about (insert reason you actually like the company here).

I had a question about the offer. The base salary was a bit lower than I was expecting. Do you think we could get it adjusted? (If you have a point of leverage insert that here like, "My current comp is actually pretty close to this offer and I am expecting an promotion sometime in the next 6 months based on conversations with my manager").

I hope we can work this out over the next few days because I think this opportunity is the right next step in my career.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

Company: "Okay we can do 115K"

Candidate: Thanks so much for getting those adjustments. I was targeting closer to a 150K base salary. I am very invested in the role and the company though. I'm specifically excited about working with XYZ.

Do you think we can move the base salary closer to that 150K mark? If not could we get a sign on bonus for the difference?

If you could get to 150K base salary or something like 130K with a 20K sign on bonus I'd be ready to sign today and could start 2 weeks from Friday.

Company: probably comes back with something less than 150K but something a whole lot better than 100K.

I've had exactly one person I coached ever have their offer pulled. He basically said here are all the reasons your company sucks and I need XXXk to come work there.

That's not negotiating. Negotiating is finding a point where you and the company both feel like you are both fairly valued.

Recently I want to move work and willing to take a pay cut just to move so gone in with the honest approach which I am told is bad for maximizing salary. Right now I'm not to fussed about maximizing, it's just moving.

The conversation normally goes:

Company: What is your current salary

Me: $XXX,XXX, that is negotiable as actively looking to move and will take less for the right company. *(I understand it's a high salary to the rest of the market where I am even though I am not in the US so salary is still well below US Junior FAANG)

Then it's been one of two things:

1) Get offered 30-40% less (20% less is my ballpark, 25% for a company that really interests me) 2) Bye

I've been told the job market is booming where I am but in 15 years it's the first time I've struggled to find a job although my skills are in demand overseas. I feel I'm fairly competent, I get told good things by people I work with and my salary has naturally grown through promotion based on my skills/performance yet I'm starting to question is it just me and I'm not that good why I am now struggling to find work despite going in to large orgs as a small dedicated team to do projects they couldn't deliver.

It seems if I take a big paycut to where I was 5-10 years ago, forget 15 years of career and revert back to writing NodeJS/Python apps my luck will be better.

Plus we got paid well. Win/win :]

Yeah, there's cost-of-living factors involved, but gamedev in the UK (and Europe?) just pays poorly. There's certainly money being made, but it's usually buying fancy cars for studio directors, not going into rewarding the dev team.

And in a post-Covid world, 'being in/near London' may not be able to increase your earning potential in the way it usually has done.

Plus HSA contributions, 401k matching, dependent care FSA contributions, etc. The US has tons of tax advantage pay options for the well heeled employers. If someone says they’re earning $250k, and doesn’t specify if it’s total comp or not, I assume the employer is kicking in an extra $50k for various benefits.

That's complete nonsense.

150k is scraping by when attempting to live in any of the most desirable cities of the USA, some of which happen to reside in California.

It's a huge state, there's plenty of housing outside of Santa Monica and San Francisco.

We would probably need about $20k more for the same lifestyle had we not gotten lucky with timing buying a house (we bought in 2011, right before a big increase in prices). Alternatively we could have kids sharing a bedroom and live otherwise the same.

Second, yes after taxes your take home pay per month is ~8k, and a little more if you have dependents. But here's a couple of things to put into perspective:

1. It's not a lot of money if that's your household income and you have kids. Buying a house is nearly impossible with that salary and the average rent for a two bedroom apartment goes 3.5k which also includes a significant commute. Houses are even more expensive to rent. You can definitely get cheaper deals, there's no shortage of shitty housing in California. There's also rent control deals if you never moved out of a house for a decade.

2. A decent employer sponsored health insurance costs about 350 a month for the family.

3. Car payments and insurance on an average are about 400 per month.

4. you put about 500 per month to 401k if you want any decent future savings.

5. Utilities (Internet, water, electricity, gas) comes to about 300 per month

6. That leaves you about 3000 for groceries, gas, medical expenses, school related expenses, recreation, clothing, and bunch of other expenses for say a family of 3-4. That's not a lot of money tbh if you want to save anything at all.

Sure 150k is a great salary if you're fresh out of college and share an apartment with other people. But 150k isn't a starting game dev salary. And it isn't a remote part of CA salary either. This is a salary paid in big cities that are too freakin expensive to stay in.

PS: most of these estimates are conservative, it can easily exceed the cost. For eg, we only have one internet service provider in our area. And if you want the worst plan with bad speed and data caps, you still shell out 80$/month after they finish adding all the bs fees.

In my particular case, when moving from the UK to the US, my estimate is that the "headline" salary number for the US offer I got overstated my pay by about 30% when comparing on a "like for like" basis with the UK salary. It was still a pay increase, but not by as much as you would think from just looking at the two salary numbers.

The main differences were: 1) my UK taxes were lower, 2) the UK job made pension contributions worth about 18% of salary, while the US one didn't, and 3) the US job deducts about 5% of my salary for health insurance premiums.

Even to do that, you need to consider:

* State and local income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes

* The value of the particular benefits packages at the respective jobs

* The comparative cost of living difference (housing can be up to a 10x difference)

* Insurance rate differences (which can vary widely because most insurance regulations are per-state)

edit: for the skeptical, this is what an L4 makes at Google[1], L4 is easily attainable within 3 years, pretty likely in 2 years, that's assuming you start at L3 (straight out of college or very little experience).

1: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

How much does the average roblox dev make?

Epic games probably pays highly, as well as riot, and value. But I can count on maybe 1 hand, the number of actual good "video game" companies that I would want to work for.

To be fair I give people the same advice. Just that the people who want to Artists look at me like I'm insane because nothing I say would stop them from living that life. The people who just want to make some art realize that it's not that bad to get paid well in a career and do art on the side.

If there are really sewage industry jobs that pay better than FAANG, please tell me more cause I'm interested

As a side note - In my experience the best paid but most mind-meltingly dangerous industrial controls work is in oil refining. The most low-stress (and somewhat less well paid) work i've experienced is in designing control systems for hydroelectric facilities for private utilities. I wouldn't consider either glamorous but the hydro work does have a more environmentally friendly image and does have a correlating lower pay!

I don't know... tell that to everyone who rebranded their statistics degree as "Data Science" starting ten years ago and got a huge career boost, or all the fresh-outs with multi-hundred-$ grant packages because they got an A in their Machine Learning class.

In fact, I can think of glamorous places that do pretty well for their software engineers (Pixar, Apple, ...) and I've seen firsthand how unglamorous companies can also be shitty and low-pay.

Apart from video games, I think there's not many examples to bolster your claim.

Only if one falls for the canard that employers anywhere - yes, in Silicon Valley as well - are actually paying their employees their full worth. If they were doing that, they wouldn't be making any money.

Most of the companies that are large enough to be hiring internationally are already paying even their top-earning non-executive staff a tiny fraction of what they bring to the table. Any company that's trying to undercut that even more in the name of "location awareness" isn't a company I want to work at.

There is a low barrier to solving someone's pain in creating a typical CRUD app. Its easy to pick an industry, find an application that could use some newer features and create something. Copying feature parity involves little creative work.

There is no ceiling on making a game fun to play. Creative, fun ways to do crafting, leveling, fighting, puzzles, etc. can engage players to come back and replay content infinitely if that is the goal.

There's the in-principle estimatable work to implement all of the game systems and then there's all the other unpredictable work to actually make the damn thing fun.

Feature-creep is endemic because creative directors/stake-holders can just move the goalposts or insist on their pet features / vision.

>I suspect that even technically simpler games like 2d platformers are probably much harder to develop now than they were a few decades ago, due to necessity of competing against every other activity the player has to choose

I'd say they are harder to *succeed* than a few decades back. Especially for indies. Development is easier than ever with tools and assets available for no cost (during development at least).

e.g. If you make a platformer in 2008 and get it on a store for $20, you would probably get a decent following just because you managed to get it on the store.

If you make the same game in 2020, even if it was a really good game, it's harder to be noticed and gamers will always have "but is it as good as Hollow Knight/Celeste" in the back of their heads. Games that each spent years refining their mechanics and ultimately sold for $20 each. Games that right now sell for $10. It indirectly buries and caps your market to try and compete there.

I remember hearing about companies actually training their people.

Don't spend a lot on school for becoming an artist, find another job (welder) and then do art on your spare time as a hobby. The creative arts are rarely rewarded and there's stiff competition.

Actors are certainly not unskilled, many are well paid, and some of the most vocally supportive of the SAG are the extremely well paid ones. They're also involved in an artistic pursuit, and similarly have various other options for converting their talent into cash ("selling out").

Yeah, it's a good idea to learn how to negotiate and good advice to leave a failing company if you can.

But "just learn to negotiate" is really a non-solution if the goal is to transform unacceptable industry wide labor practices.

Unions don't necessarily eliminate pay disparity, but they work for increased worker benefits in total.

It's honestly a lot like development - it's hard to distinguish someone being lazy or bad from someone who's gotten stuck with difficult problems - or, more likely, problems that looked easier on the surface than they were in actuality. But, unlike development where these measures could potentially be discovered by reducing efficiency and forcing multiple devs to solve problems in parallel - that's impossible to do when every student is different at a basic level.

Actors and athletes have extremely high visibility. They are singled out by fans who will show up to movies and games on that star power alone. A similar dynamic will not develop in the game programming world where even phenomenal developers labor in obscurity.

I can't speak to movie stars, but as for the NBA, there is absolutely the concept of a maximum salary (depends on years of service plus other things besides the point) in the collective bargaining agreement. This limits the compensation a player may receive from a team for a particular year. The top players like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, would no question receive higher salaries if this limit did not exist.

As to whether or not the top players or even the players as a whole are better off or worse off for having a union, that's a horse of a different color. My gut feeling is that both classes are better off.