Counted hourly from studios' own careers pages — not aggregator feeds, not recruiter
reposts. Every number below is live right now.
Updated 3 November 2026 · refreshes hourly
Pay transparency
65%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 39% as British Columbia and Ontario phase their rules in.
Based on 1,350 US roles and 3,824 elsewhere.
The junior problem
8%
of open game jobs are entry level
458 of 5,976 roles. Mid-level alone is 2,725 — about 6× as many.
The industry is hiring experience, not training it.
Ghost listings
1 in 3
roles have been open 90+ days
2,180 listings have sat on a careers page for over three months, and
3,123 are past sixty days. Some are real and slow. Some were never going to be filled.
What the ladder actually pays
Entry$77K
Mid$124K
Senior$179K
Lead$231K
Director+$239K
Median advertised midpoint, from the 1,348 roles that publish a range. The step from mid to senior is +44% — the largest jump on the ladder.
Silence
10
countries where not one game job lists pay
Japan, France, Poland, Türkiye, India, Vietnam, Serbia, Israel and more.
Zero out of 1,587 roles between them.
Remote
13%
748 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 1,800 roles naming a figure. 208 of them ask for a decade or more.
Craft concentration
30%
of every open role is Engineering
1,772 roles. Art is second at 847. QA is 160 and Audio is 59 — a rounding error by comparison.
Biggest hirer
351
open roles at Electronic Arts
Then Ubisoft 296, Roblox 266, Sony Interactive 208, Riot Games 182.
Where the jobs are
Tokyo
522 open roles — the largest single city
San Mateo 314, Montréal 267, Vancouver 189. The centre of gravity is not where most job boards look.
Churn
511
roles opened in the last 7 days
9% of the board turns over weekly. A job search that checks monthly misses most of what appears.
Nobody is training anyone
214
of 303 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
1.35:1
Unreal roles per Unity role
Unreal 495 · 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
51%
of all open roles sit with just 20 companies
Out of 303 hiring companies. The top 10 alone hold
36%, and the top 5 hold 22%. Most studios are hiring one or two people.
Most-asked-for skills
Unreal492
Python472
C++449
Unity292
Monetization265
SQL228
Extracted from the requirements text of every open posting.
Transparency by country
United States65%
Canada39%
Japan0%
United Kingdom6%
South Korea1%
France0%
Share of that country's open roles publishing a salary range.
Method. Every figure is counted from live postings on 303 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
23% 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.