Quality of Life in the Game Industry
In 2004 International Game Developers Association launched its initial Quality of Life (QoL) survey as an effort to gain a clearer understanding of some employment issues in the game industry – from “crunch time” to compensation. The IGDA is a non-profit membership organization of individual creators of video games that aims to connect members with their peers, promote game development as a profession and the professional development of its members, and advocate on issues that affect the developer community.
In 2009, we partnered with the IGDA to develop a new version of the Quality of Life survey and to process and analyse its results. In 2014, this partnership took on a broader scope as we combined previous surveys on demography, diversity, employment and added state of the industry questions to create a new encompassing Developers’ Satisfaction Survey (DSS). Following its inaugural release in 2014, we’ve conducted the DSS in 2015, 2016, and 2017. After this we moved to a biennial release and have conducted the DSS in 2019, 2021 and 2023. We maintain the core questions to ensure a comparable dataset over time, but have made tweaks to add or remove some sections. For instance, we no longer include state of the industry questions, but added one-time questions about the pandemic in 2021 and questions about game crediting practices in 2023.
The reports below include those written by us for the IGDA as well as those based our own independent analysis of the survey data.
Reports can also be found at the IGDA website.