Counted hourly from studios' own careers pages — not aggregator feeds, not recruiter
reposts. Every number below is live right now.
Updated 4 August 2026 · refreshes hourly
Pay transparency
70%vs8%
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 37% as British Columbia and Ontario phase their rules in.
Based on 1,193 US roles and 3,695 elsewhere.
The junior problem
5%
of open game jobs are entry level
275 of 5,771 roles. Mid-level alone is 2,667 — about 10× as many.
The industry is hiring experience, not training it.
Ghost listings
1 in 5
roles have been open 90+ days
1,240 listings have sat on a careers page for over three months, and
1,905 are past sixty days. Some are real and slow. Some were never going to be filled.
What the ladder actually pays
Entry$94K
Mid$124K
Senior$187K
Lead$222K
Director+$229K
Median advertised midpoint, from the 1,264 roles that publish a range. The step from mid to senior is +51% — the largest jump on the ladder.
Silence
13
countries where not one game job lists pay
Japan, South Korea, France, Poland, India, Vietnam, Sweden, Serbia and more.
Zero out of 1,825 roles between them.
Remote
12%
714 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 1,799 roles naming a figure. 217 of them ask for a decade or more.
Craft concentration
30%
of every open role is Engineering
1,707 roles. Art is second at 829. QA is 159 and Audio is 62 — a rounding error by comparison.
Biggest hirer
360
open roles at Electronic Arts
Then Ubisoft 276, Roblox 220, Sony Interactive 199, KRAFTON 190.
Where the jobs are
Tokyo
333 open roles — the largest single city
Montréal 312, San Mateo 246, Seoul 193. The centre of gravity is not where most job boards look.
Churn
592
roles opened in the last 7 days
10% of the board turns over weekly. A job search that checks monthly misses most of what appears.
Nobody is training anyone
187
of 268 studios have no entry-level role open
Only 81 studios — 30% — 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
1.55:1
Unreal roles per Unity role
Unreal 513 · Unity 330. 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
51%
of all open roles sit with just 20 companies
Out of 268 hiring companies. The top 10 alone hold
35%, and the top 5 hold 22%. Most studios are hiring one or two people.
Most-asked-for skills
Unreal507
C++431
Python397
Multiplayer285
Live Ops275
Monetization267
Extracted from the requirements text of every open posting.
Transparency by country
United States70%
Canada37%
United Kingdom5%
Japan0%
South Korea0%
France0%
Share of that country's open roles publishing a salary range.
Method. Every figure is counted from live postings on 268 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
22% 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.