Over at MSNBC, they've done an in-depth story on game industry salaries, at least partly based on the 2007 Game Developer magazine Salary Survey that we ended up creating for the April 2007 issue of the magazine.

The piece has an interesting, if odd angle - why is $73,000 (the average salary for a game developer in 2006) actually fair? "That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? These folks aren’t saving lives or even doing your taxes. So why would the typical game developer — whose average age is somewhere between 31 and 35 — make twice as much as the average social worker?"

Oh, wait, here's why: “Because the industry as a whole makes a lot of money,” says Matthew Tateishi, a San Francisco-based game designer with nearly 13 years of experience. “And for the most part, a lot of that gets passed on to the employees.”" This is partly true, and then of course: "But if you think game-makers spend all day playing “Quake,” think again. This is a fast-paced, competitive business with inflexible ship dates and punishing hours."

[Also, Game Developer's Jill Duffy, who was quoted in the piece, would like to give a shout out to Audience Insights' Kevin O'Neill, who, despite the credit to her in the piece, was actually the person who conducted the survey and crunched the numbers, before she whipped it into shape and made it contextual and cool-looking. Yay.]