Many of the thousands of young people who will make the pilgrimage to the Gamescom video game trade fair in Cologne at the end of August dream of a career in the gaming industry.
Thanks to a venture by the Hamburg company Innogames, potential game designers now also know how much one can earn in this industry.
Innogames, a medium-sized company with 430 employees and annual sales of 220 million euros, is the largest German developer of games for smartphones and tablets, referred to as "mobile games" in industry jargon.
Anyone who plays this in their spare time may know "Forge of Empires", a strategy game that is one of the company's best-known.
Bastian Benrath
Editor in Business.
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Innogames is taking a step that seems radical compared to other medium-sized companies: the company first harmonized its salaries internally, adjusted them upwards and is now also making the salary ranges public.
In doing so, the game developer wants to ensure fairness and the greatest possible transparency – for applicants as well as for its employees.
If the usual salaries are known, "then the employee can discuss this very openly and transparently with his manager," says Innogames personnel manager Andreas Lieb of the FAZ Heimlichtuerei about the remuneration, as is common in many companies of a comparable size in Germany, he rejects.
Instead he asks: "We don't pay badly, so why don't we say so?"
Developers can earn more than 100,000 euros a year
As can be seen from the salary tables that were previously available to the FAZ, the company pays its game designers a starting salary of at least 34,000 euros per year.
The maximum standard salary for experienced designers is EUR 85,000, but even higher salaries are possible when moving to a higher position or as a proven expert.
Developers – i.e. the employees who do not design games but actually program them – get higher salaries than designers.
The starting salary for them is 48,000 euros, without personnel responsibility the standard salary increases to 96,000 euros a year.
Team leaders receive between 75,000 and 115,000 euros, division heads more than 115,000 euros.
Lieb explains the difference between the salaries of designers and programmers with the situation on the market: It is simply a question of supply and demand, since programmers are also wanted in numerous other sectors, from industry to banking.
"They can choose the industry," he says.
Marketing employees at Innogames earn between 44,000 and 89,700 euros, team leaders up to 106,375 euros.
System administrators and market analysts are in a similar field.
Artists earn less.
Salaries there range between 32,000 and 68,000 euros, only team leaders receive more.
All totals are gross salaries for employees in Germany;
Salaries abroad may vary.
In total, Innogames has set salary bands for nine job profiles, which cover around 80 percent of the workforce.
Traditional companies are also looking for digital talent
Of course, Innogames does not start the transparency campaign without reason.
Like all companies in Germany that want to grow and are dependent on specially qualified workers, Innogames also suffers from the shortage of skilled workers.
According to Lieb, the company does not have an acute shortage of staff, but it finds it difficult to fill vacancies with the right qualifications.
Especially since there is now more competition for skilled workers who used to only be employed in digital companies.
"You can see that traditional companies are now suddenly wanting jobs that we were previously the only ones looking for." Examples include user experience (UX) designers or online marketing managers.
In order to find new employees, Innogames therefore recruits internationally, for example throughout Europe, Russia or Latin America and Africa.
Soon, employees from other European countries will also have the opportunity to work remotely without having to leave their home country.
"We have to do that because the market simply requires it," says Lieb.
The publication of the salary tables is intended to further facilitate the recruitment of new specialists.
In Eastern Europe, for example, it is common to publish the associated salary with a job advertisement, explains Lieb.
Lieb defends the decision that Innogames also proactively increased the salaries of its employees in the course of harmonization.
"Most companies only increase salaries when employees ask for it," says the HR manager.
"That's usually how it is in medium-sized companies, and that's how it used to be at Innogames too.
But that's not fair.” After all, it has been proven that women or simply shy employees are disadvantaged by this approach.
The transparency also has very productive effects, reports Lieb: “Twice a year we have further development talks with every employee.
Since the salary range has been clear, employees have been asking many more questions such as: What else do I need to move up to the upper end of the range?” The focus of the process is the further development of the employees.
Every company needs a "career model", i.e. the opportunity for employees to develop further and to move up according to objectively measurable criteria.