Counted hourly from studios' own careers pages — not aggregator feeds, not recruiter
reposts. Every number below is live right now.
Updated 18 September 2026 · refreshes hourly
Pay transparency
64%vs9%
of US game jobs publish a salary. Outside the US, almost none do.
This tracks legislation, not generosity. Colorado, California, New York and
Washington require pay ranges in job ads, and US employers comply. Canada sits at 36% as British Columbia and Ontario phase their rules in.
Based on 1,310 US roles and 3,978 elsewhere.
The junior problem
6%
of open game jobs are entry level
347 of 6,158 roles. Mid-level alone is 2,954 — about 9× as many.
The industry is hiring experience, not training it.
Ghost listings
1 in 4
roles have been open 90+ days
1,604 listings have sat on a careers page for over three months, and
2,890 are past sixty days. Some are real and slow. Some were never going to be filled.
What the ladder actually pays
Entry$82K
Mid$124K
Senior$181K
Lead$209K
Director+$230K
Median advertised midpoint, from the 1,302 roles that publish a range. The step from mid to senior is +46% — the largest jump on the ladder.
Silence
11
countries where not one game job lists pay
Japan, France, Poland, Türkiye, Sweden, India, Vietnam, Serbia and more.
Zero out of 1,758 roles between them.
Remote
12%
761 fully remote roles. Studios label hybrid and on-site far more readily, so read this as a floor.
Experience asked
5 yrs
median, where a number is stated
Of 1,824 roles naming a figure. 208 of them ask for a decade or more.
Craft concentration
30%
of every open role is Engineering
1,873 roles. Art is second at 866. QA is 172 and Audio is 58 — a rounding error by comparison.
Biggest hirer
324
open roles at Electronic Arts
Then Ubisoft 298, Roblox 242, Sony Interactive 193, Xsolla 179.
Where the jobs are
Tokyo
520 open roles — the largest single city
Montréal 313, San Mateo 282, Vancouver 202. The centre of gravity is not where most job boards look.
Churn
467
roles opened in the last 7 days
8% of the board turns over weekly. A job search that checks monthly misses most of what appears.
Nobody is training anyone
222
of 311 studios have no entry-level role open
Only 89 studios — 29% — are advertising a
single junior position. The 5% figure understates it: the shortage is not spread thinly across
the industry, it is concentrated in a handful of studios that still hire beginners.
Engine demand
1.34:1
Unreal roles per Unity role
Unreal 494 · Unity 368. Counted where the posting
names the engine in its title or requirements — so this is demand for the skill, not a headcount of studios.
Concentration
49%
of all open roles sit with just 20 companies
Out of 311 hiring companies. The top 10 alone hold
33%, and the top 5 hold 20%. Most studios are hiring one or two people.
Most-asked-for skills
Unreal490
C++435
Python416
Unity293
Monetization280
Multiplayer256
Extracted from the requirements text of every open posting.
Transparency by country
United States64%
Canada36%
Japan0%
United Kingdom5%
South Korea1%
France0%
Share of that country's open roles publishing a salary range.
Method. Every figure is counted from live postings on 311 studios' own
applicant tracking systems — Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Ashby and others — re-read hourly. No
aggregator feeds, no recruiter reposts, no paid placements. "Lists pay" means a salary range
published by the employer; a role is counted once, in the country its posting names.
What this is not. Coverage is the studios listed on DevQuest, which skews toward companies
large enough to run a public careers page. The board-wide transparency figure has drifted down to
21% since June, but the number of roles publishing pay has stayed nearly flat — the
denominator grew as non-US studios were added. The mix changed, not the behaviour, which is why the
country split above is the honest view and a single blended percentage is not.
Free to cite and quote with a link to this page. Corrections welcome.
See the roles behind the numbers
Every role counted here is live and searchable — by craft, level, city and studio.