Content
- Ukrainian Gamedev During the War
- Portrait of Respondents and Main Correlations
- Companies and War
- Relation to Employers and eNPS
- Willingness to Change Jobs: Main Reasons
- Job Loss During The War
- Salaries: general information
- Art Salaries
- Game Design Salaries
- Dev Salaries
- Salaries comparison: May 2022, January 2022, Spring 2021
- Additional Income
- Bonuses
- Resume
Introduction
The Big Salary Survey is conducted annually by the recruiting company Values Value and the InGame Job platform among game development specialists in Russian-speaking countries. This year, the survey was focused on the Ukrainian market only.
We had three weeks to collect as many responses as possible, and finally, we got 761. This number is even bigger than last year if compared with the Ukrainian segment of the audience. The questionnaires were filled out anonymously via a Google form.
You can view the reports of previous years on the InGame Job platform.
- The Values Value helps game development studios hire individual specialists or entire teams, set up HR processes, and build an employer brand.
- InGame Job is an online platform with all vacancies in the gaming industry.
Our partners: DevGAMM, GD BAY, Games Gathering.
The analysis in this report is based on a sample obtained from the responses of active users who have expressed a desire to take an online survey, and is not considered a definite statement about the state of the market. However, according to the experience of Values Value and InGame Job, the resulting sample is as representative as possible.
HOW TO READ RESEARCH AND CHARTS:
- N – number of questionnaires.
- N, % – a percentage of the total number of questionnaires in the sample.
- Q1 – the first quartile of salaries in US dollars.
- Median – is the median value of salaries in US dollars. The median value divides the sample into two equal parts: one-half of respondents receive salaries less than the median, and the other half more than the median.
- Median 2022 – the median value of salaries for 2022 in US dollars.
- Q3 – the third quartile of the value of salaries in US dollars.
- % Δ – is the difference between the median salaries of 2021 and 2022 as a percentage.
Ukrainian Gamedev During the War
Since the beginning of the war, a massive number of specialists have been relocated inside and outside the country. Men are not allowed to leave Ukraine, so many of them have settled in the western regions. Women and some groups of men who can leave Ukraine for family reasons or health reasons have left for different European countries.
Unfortunately, the number of those wishing to return to Ukraine will decrease over time. The longer the war lasts, the more people attach themselves to their places of seemingly temporary residence.
Values Value recruiters are already seeing this trend when communicating with candidates.
Portrait of Respondents and Main Correlations
What do you need to know about the peculiarities of the Ukrainian game development market?
- In Ukraine, most specialists cooperate with companies as b2b contractors, not as hired employees.
- In Ukraine, it is customary to keep in mind a monthly net salary (without taxes), not an annual one.
In 2022, the audience of our survey has become more expert and senior.
There are still more men in Ukrainian game development than women.
What is important to understand about men in the gaming industry of Ukraine in 2022?
- Most of them remain inside the country: because of the war and the possible general population mobilization, they do not have the right to leave. Many men combine their usual work with service in territorial defense or volunteer activities, helping those suffering from war.
On this slide, we see a significant increase in those who have switched to a remote work format since the beginning of the war.
Also, unfortunately, the number of unemployed increased by 5.4%.
Companies and War
This slide breaks the well-known stereotype about Ukrainian game development as an outsourcing country. No, it’s not. More than half of the companies-employers of respondents of this survey publish their own games.
For many Ukrainians, it was essential to see official anti-war statements from their employers.
There is the huge number of companies with Russian roots in Ukraine.
Relation to Employers and eNPS
Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric used in customer experience programs. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to a company.
The attitude of employees to their employers has improved in 2022. Over the past year, the NPS indicator has doubled.
We believe that the reason is that companies actively support employees during the war.
But look how different the NPC will look if you divide the respondents by their employers according to the criterion of ties with Russia.
Willingness to Change Jobs: Main Reasons
The top reasons why employees would like to change jobs are generally the same as last year.
However, among many respondents, it has now become important which roots the company has (Russian or Belarusian) and whether their employers have made anti-war statements. Many call the reason for the desire to change jobs that the company did not support employees during the war or did not formulate a clear position about the war.
Job Loss During The War
In general, during the war, women and men lost their jobs in the same proportions.
Curiously, there are more senior-level specialists among those who have lost their jobs.
Salaries
It is very interesting that in 2022 the median salaries of specialists have become significantly higher than in 2021.
The first reason is that Ukrainian companies showed profit growth before the war.
The second reason is that the last years of the pandemic have opened up a remote format of work for Ukrainian specialists and the possibility of cooperation with global companies in which salaries are higher than local ones.
Despite the war in 2022, the median salaries of specialists are growing at both the senior and middle levels. Some grow substantially: for example, the salaries of analysts, HR managers, programmers, producers, UA, and QA specialists.
This year, we asked respondents to compare their salaries a year ago – in 2021, in January 2022 (a month before active hostilities), and at the time of the survey (in May 2022). Interestingly, the median salaries of senior-level specialists in May 2022 increased by 300 euros. The middle-level specialists and the juniors also had slightly higher salaries during the war.
Curiously, the average additional income in 2022 decreased for all specialists except experts.
More Ukrainian professionals began to assess their incomes as satisfactory in 2022. Probably not only because salaries have increased. The situation in the country probably led to the fact that they began to appreciate more what they have.
Bonuses
With the war’s beginning, it is understandable that employees are deprived of financial bonuses. But please note that 10% more respondents now indicate the overtime payment.
The main information on this slide is a significant increase in the number of employers who give employees life and health insurance as a bonus.
Resume
The war affected the Ukrainian game dev:
- 17% of respondents fled abroad; 10% of them do not plan to return to Ukraine, 24% have not yet decided;
- 66% plan to live in Ukraine after the end of war;
- 78% work totally remote, the number of remote workers has increased by 58.4% since the beginning of the war;
- 85% of Ukrainian companies continue to work;
- only 9% of respondents are ready to work with Russian Federation-related companies;
- 18,4% of respondents are volunteers and help the army and civilians;
- after the war, 19.5% of respondents are switching or have already switched to Ukrainian in companies, 47.2% are mixing languages, 15.4 continue to speak Russian, and the rest used only Ukrainian in working communication before the war;
- 15% would change their job due to lack of or poor support for employees during the war;
- 10% of men and 9% of women have lost their jobs since the beginning of the war.
General changes and conclusions in 2022:
- the audience of our survey has become more expert and senior;
- there are still fewer women in the Ukrainian gaming industry than men, but their number is growing from year to year – in 2022 there are 37.2%;
- the average age of respondents is 30;
- in addition to English (which is well spoken by more than 45% of respondents – at the level of upper-intermediate), Ukrainian professionals speak German (26%), Polish (26%), French (14%), and other languages;
- the majority of respondents (73,5%) work in the staff of companies, full-time.
All about money in 2022:
- salaries of Ukrainian specialists have increased significantly – by $800 for C-level professionals and seniors, $400 for middle-level specialists, and $210 for juniors;
- financial bonuses in 2022 companies give employees much less; the exception is the payment of overtimes, they began to be paid 10% more often;
- 14% more companies began to offer health insurance as a perk in 2022;
- almost every 5th respondent has extra sources of income.
