According to StackOverflow Developer Survey 2018
Am curious about the numbers since in my experience the number the listed for a game Dev is low even for junior positions.
Itās probably pulled down by indie developers who are just barely scraping by. Fewer people are willing to live on instant ramen to make their dream accounting software.
But itās quite true that programmers can generally earn a lot more in non-game fields and not have to deal with other drawbacks like long crunch periods and bonuses based on metacritic scores. Itās an employerās market.
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I just about spit my coffee laughing at that line Toni. 
But yeah, I have a feeling that survey takes indies into account and probably even those that arenāt full time game devs.
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Also of noteā¦ it defaults to āGlobalā. If you click āUnited Statesā in the tab at the top, the numbers are more realisticā¦ but even in the US theyāll vary greatly depending on state and metropolitan area.
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Huh.
I donāt remember filling out this survey.
Tell that to Notch.
my guess is that the numbers are really bloated by the sheer amount of not so successful indie companies and the likes.
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Statistically, there are probably outliers on both ends of the game dev spectrum. Everything from broke indie to mega hit indies. I donāt know how much the game dev numbers are necessarily pulled down by starving indies in this case. For all we know, this survey may have focused on salaried positions. Most starving indies are self employed when doing game dev work.
I definitely would believe overall that software developers outside the game industry make more money in general, especially when comparing salaried positions. Boring backend software development is always worth big money to large corporations, so salaried software developers working on that stuff tend to get paid a very competitive wage.
Generally speaking, game development is more fun than developing banking software, but banks pay software developers better. I thought this was something obvious that everybody already knew.
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Iām not really sure that AAA/studio games development is more fun than back-end software development. My experience suggests that for software engineers, small to medium start-ups where engineering is highly-regarded and quality of both code and architecture is valued tend to be the more āfunā environments.
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@JohnnyA but but but you get to play video games all day long!
Iāve specialized in backend stuff most of my career, and have found it to have more hard problems then almost any other area you can work in. Designing systems for limited environments is hard, but solving for scale is harder.
I thought this was common knowledge.
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True but itās also easiest to become a game developer. With advent of user friendly engines like Unity nobody need to reinvent hot water when they start developing a game. All you need to call yourself a game developer these days is a good idea and the drive and discipline to develop.
Sure your unsuccess will end up as a statistic splatter on the proverbial wall, making game development look like a bad fiscal decision, but at least youāre developing something.
Protip.: there are no indie āEngineering managersā or āDevOps specialistsā or āData scientist or machine learning specialistā.
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Its even easier to become a business developer and earn 250-500k USD per year easy 
Depending on your country.
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It is much easier to become a front-end web dev.
Back-end development isnāt much more difficult either, thereāre frameworks and library for pretty much everything
Which is probably why itās not on the list as the earnings are in the negative
āFront endā and "front end web" are not to be confused.
Anyone can call themself whatever they like, but there are very few that actually are good backend developers, I have been in the business for about 20 years, have met so many idiots to be frank Itās very seldom I get to be impressed, a bit sad
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Then what do you mean by āfront end webā?
From some reason even expensive websites Iāve worked on had beginners working on them. Itās like people donāt do any wetting when hiring web devs.