It's that time of year again! We've launched the annual
Game Developer Salary Survey, and we really need your help; the more responses we get, the more useful our results will be. The survey only takes about 7-10 minutes to fill out, and you have the option of entering to win a free GDC Main Conference Pass to the 2013
event of your choice (GDC 2013, GDC Next, GDC China, or GDC Europe).
The Salary Survey is my favorite feature of
Game Developer, and I suspect, based on the amount of feedback I get on it, that it's your favorite feature, too. People all over the industry -- and all over the world -- use it to benchmark the industry's health, negotiate better terms, consider career changes, and all other kinds of important things. Think about the next major career decision (or life decision) you're going to make: Don't you want to know how your industry is doing before you make that choice? Wouldn't you want the best data you could get your hands on?
So take the survey, but don't just stop there. Send it to your friends and colleagues who work in the industry and ask them to take it, too. Programmers, artists, writers, businesspeople, QA, designers -- if your job is related to making games for a living, we want to hear from you! And not just salaried devs; we want to hear from indies, contractors, and everyone else. Let's pool our knowledge and find out how our industry is doing!
Patrick Miller
Editor,
Game Developer
Atebits's Letterpress was one of the more popular iOS apps of late 2012, with 60,000 downloads on its first day alone. It was one of those games that everybody suddenly seemed to be playing, and it's been in constant play on my iPad since release. This success is warranted--on top of being a fun, competitive word game, it has a fair amount to teach us about intuitive UI and game design on touch devices.
Had I written this editorial two weeks earlier, I'd probably be writing
about how enthusiastic I am to introduce our first-ever mobile-themed
issue. In the past few years, mobile games have grown into a part of the
industry no developer can afford to ignore, and the fact that Game
Developer hasn't ever devoted an entire issue to the topic until now is
rather shortsighted on our part.
"Free-to-play is killing video games!" If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times. From a business perspective, free-to-play is a useful tool because it can offer smaller studios a shot at an extraordinarily wide audience and higher overall revenues than the pay-once model--which, in turn, means more stability and job security. But nobody likes playing--or making--a game that feels like it's powered by your wallet, either. Rather than wish f2p would go away, we'll just have to get really good at using it.
On February 20, 2013, the game industry lost one of its few great iconoclasts. This was the date when Kenji Eno, known for games like D, Enemy Zero, and Real Sound, passed away, leaving a legacy as a creative force that would not be tamed.
They say you're forever dating your first love. Not literally, of course, but the early patterns set by your first relationship, and the relationships of your parents, tend to strongly influence how you approach love and relationships for many years to come. I wonder: Is the same true for games? Do those early games we played in our formative years influence what we now perceive as "good" and "bad" in interactive media? Do they influence how we design games? I submit that they may.
It's that time of year again! We've launched the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, and we really need your help; the more responses we get, the more useful our results will be. The survey only takes about 7-10 minutes to fill out, and you have the option of entering to win a free GDC Main Conference Pass to the 2013
Design Of The Times - September 2012 
