Salary Increase Competition in the Gaming Industry... Small and Medium Companies Join In

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] The salary increase relay in the gaming industry is extending to small and medium-sized game companies. As the developer recruitment shortage intensifies, competition among game companies to secure talent is also fierce.

According to the gaming industry on the 4th, Vespa recently announced through an internal notice that it will uniformly raise the annual salary of all employees by 12 million KRW. This applies to all employees regardless of rank, position, or job, and also applies equally to prospective employees whose hiring has been confirmed.

Another small game company, Bagelcode, announced a salary increase plan to raise the development positions' salaries by at least 23 million KRW including stock options, and non-development positions by 15 million KRW including stock options.

The chain of salary increases extending even to small and medium-sized game companies is mainly attributed to the developer recruitment shortage. In particular, the gaming industry tends to have more freedom of job change compared to other sectors, as teams usually work on a project basis, and after completing one project, many developers increase their market value and move to other companies. For game companies, joining the salary increase trend is unavoidable to retain existing development talent.

Especially in Vespa's case, last year it recorded sales of 68.2 billion KRW and an operating loss of 31.8 billion KRW, indicating poor performance. This is a 34% decrease compared to the previous year's sales (100.5 billion KRW), and the operating loss nearly quadrupled from 8.6 billion KRW. Despite the deteriorating performance, the salary increase is interpreted as an inevitable choice to retain talent.

Developer recruitment announcements are also pouring out like a flood. Nexon, which announced an 8 million KRW salary increase plan, is currently hiring new and experienced employees. Recruitment fields include game programmers, AI engineers, message platform development, planning, security services, and more, with recruitment ongoing until positions are filled. Krafton, which decided to raise developer salaries up to 20 million KRW, is conducting continuous recruitment across all departments including QA, TECH, management, IT infrastructure, art, UX/UI, etc. In particular, the scale of open recruitment is planned to be significantly expanded to hundreds of people. Devsisters Kingdom is conducting large-scale recruitment in double digits. They plan to massively recruit talent to lead the growth of the new mobile game 'Cookie Run: Kingdom,' expanding the organization's size and capabilities.

There are also forecasts that small-scale game companies will find survival itself difficult amid the hiring war in the gaming industry. Professor Wi Jeonghyun of Chung-Ang University, president of the Korea Game Society, pointed out, "Small and medium-sized game companies do not have sufficient financial power, so they are not free from the outflow of high-level personnel," adding, "The disparity in securing talent within the industry may worsen."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.