There are two wolves among today's video game industry job applicants: one has just received a job offer from Netflix as a video game graphics programmer with an annual salary of $600,000 and is tearing shit up with reckless glee. The other, having received the same job offer but with a salary of only $50,000, is howling in despair, barely able to live out of his car in Los Angeles. Netflix says it "relies on market indicators to determine compensation and will consider your specific job group, background, skills, and experience to offer you an appropriate compensation."

I call bullshit.

A $500,000 salary range may be accurate in an economic survey of the entire gaming industry, from college grads to superstar veterans. But in the case of this specific job ad (opens in new tab), the comical range of $50,000 to $600,000 is Netflix's way of evading California's new transparency law, which requires employers to list the salary range of new hires. Netflix may be strictly following the letter of the new law, which takes effect in early 2023, but it certainly is not following its spirit. And Netflix is not the only gaming company that posts ridiculously broad salary ranges as a minimum compliance.

New laws in California, New York City, and Washington state require employers to list expected salaries in job ads, but the wording of each law is different and all three are unfortunately vague. California requires that the advertisement state "the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay for the position," while New York requires that the advertisement state a "good faith salary range." Of course, the company does not have to prove that the salary range was presented in good faith; if someone objects, it must instead prove that it was stated in bad faith.

The intent of this type of transparency law is to ensure that employees receive equal compensation for equal work despite differences in race, gender, and background (pay inequality is an ongoing problem, especially in the high-tech industry). Most gaming companies in the three states I researched have already posted salary bands, but some have not (Bellevue-based Sucker Punch (open in new tab) and Valve (open in new tab) need to update their listings).

In some cases, a wider salary range can indicate that a game studio is willing to pay more to experienced programmers in recognition of their experience level. However, in most of the job postings I have seen in the gaming industry, "wide range" is an understatement. The minimum and maximum salaries often differ by as much as $100,000, so much so that some people are making twice as much as their colleagues with the same job title and responsibilities.

For example, a senior software engineer at Minecraft, based in Redmond, Washington (opens in new tab). says Microsoft is "committed to the principle of pay equity (paying employees fairly for substantially similar work)." But the "typical base salary range" for software engineering is $112,000 to $218,400, which doesn't tell job seekers much about how much they might earn. The highs and lows may make all the difference if you are looking to buy a home in Redmond's King County, which has a median price of $760,000.

According to Washington state law, a company need only set a "minimum or expected salary," so $112,000 is not even a guaranteed minimum. Microsoft could set it lower if it chose to, but there, in theory, the competition would not cause the offer to drop too low, and making an offer below the minimum salary offered would seem to be an inappropriate hiring tactic. However, a confusingly wide salary range is an even bigger problem for positions like QA, where a minimum six-figure salary is often not offered in the first place.

Blizzard, in particular, was criticized this week for posting dramatically lower salary ranges than other studios like Riot and Bungie. But Activision's other studios seem to be worse: COD studio Sledgehammer pays $14.19 to $26.22 per hour for a QA analyst job, with a maximum annual salary of $50,000 for 52 weeks of work (not counting possible overtime). At a minimum, they would be paid only $29,515 per year before taxes.

Activision somehow managed to stay below that pitiful threshold with another QA tester position in Los Angeles that pays $11.42 to $21.20 per hour and a minimum annual salary of $23,753.

Other studios offer at least a livable wage to their QAs, but even then the pay range is inexplicably wide. For example, Tencent's Lightspeed LA offers entry-level associate QA testers salaries ranging from $67,100 to $134,200.

Riot seems to pay particularly well, with base salaries for QA Engineer IIs ranging from $47.12 to $66.35 in the LA area, or about $98,000 to $133,000 per year.Bungie's salary range is the most believable I have seen from the major studios Destiny's test lead earns $86,000-$108,000 a year, which I think is a realistic and actually useful salary range.

However, many other large studios and publishers seem content with vague salary ranges such as $203,000-$283,000 (principal software engineer at Riot) or $144,500-$237,200 (QA director at Epic). Despite complying with the new law by posting salary ranges, many companies simply post typical salary ranges for specific job titles, another cheap obfuscation tactic. Netflix, for example, posts an "overall market range" for a given role, but this tells us almost nothing about the actual salary range. Tencent is far more helpful and specific in stating the "base salary range for this position" at its California studio.

Even if most salary ranges are too broad to be particularly useful, I would hope that people would start talking more about salaries across major game studios. If Blizzard really does pay its QA team less, it will be harder to hide it. More information being made public is always a good thing for employees, not only prospective employees, but also some of the developers currently at these studios who may be seeing this salary range information for the first time and learning that they are making less than their peers.

While salary ranges for jobs in California, Washington, and New York are currently publicly available, it stands out that the same transparency is not provided to candidates applying for positions in other states or internationally. Microsoft could always make a big splash by publishing salary ranges for all 23 gaming studios, not just those based in California and Washington State. That may be overly optimistic, but one hopes that public scrutiny of the current overly broad salary ranges will lead to more honest and useful salary ranges for at least some of the companies.