Working in the games industry can be a very good career choice due to the pay on offer for more senior roles. Deciding which developer or publisher to work for is obviously going to come down to how much they are willing to pay you and whether you are a good fit for the types of games they create. If your main concern is pay, and you want to work in Japan, then Square Enix is clearly the place to seek employment.
Nensyu Labo is a company that tracks salaries across a range of industries in Japan. One of those industries is video games and they have just published the latest compensation chart for Japanese game developers and publishers.
The top 10 includes the companies you’d expect to see such as Sony, Konami, Namco Bandai, Tecmo, and Capcom, but it’s Square Enix that pays the most, and by a huge margin if these figures are to be believed.
The average salary for an employee working at the Final Fantasy studio is 21,680,000 yen. That’s roughly $273,000 a year. To put that in context, the company coming in second on the list is Sony who pays an average of $116,000. That’s less than half what Square Enix is offering.
Nensyu Labo gather their information from public records, so there’s every chance these figures are off. That incredibly high pay for Square Enix may actually represent the average across the company’s Japanese management team, or they just have some very well paid employees that push the average much higher than it is in reality.
Even so, if you don’t count Square Enix you get a good idea of how well paid you could be working in the Japanese games industry. Of course, it’s going to take you a number of years to earn anything near the average at one of these companies.