Can you make a living off of being a GM?Follow

An offline living, that is; how much do GMs get paid? Is it their actual career, or do they just GM in their spare time for spare cash? I'm not planning on becoming one, it was just a random question that came to me.

I make 9.50 =(.

I've heard they make 10 bucks an hour... however, they are also stationed in San Diego IIRC... so in their case, 10 bucks an hour I would assume would be just enough to cover cost of living expenses and not much else... I don't live in CA, so I wouldn't know first-hand.

they dont "play for free". They dont play at all. If you call dealing with complaints and teleporintg people out of walls playing, then I guess maybe they do play for free... Also, I doubt GMs are even allowed to play the actual game. Can you imagine having a regular account and a GM? Talk about an unfair advantage.

I checked into this, while I was unable to get any actual $$$ ammounts, I did find out they tend to make about Minimum wage. This might help to explain why so many of them are sometimes impatient

1 GM tends to be in charge of multiple servers, balanced out with there being a GM pool of x number of GM's and when server player requests a GM, random GM answers it.

Well they're not really tech support... they're more customer service.

I think a lot of people are under the impression GM's log in from home or you can just sign up for the job and do it remotely.
As someone said before, it's just like any other job... You go to the office, sign in/out etc, have a workstation.

and personally, $10/hr sounds pretty low to me.

San Diego is among the most expense parts of the country - indeed, of the world - for housing. 10 dollars an hour is adequate only if you still live with your parents or are sharing a house with a number of other income-earners.

These wages attract two types of people: those who are so excited to be associated with the game industry that they are willing to work for almost nothing, and people without a lot of options. A lot of industries associated with 'fun', such as the film industry and publishing, have depressed labor costs because of the high supply of people willing to work for nothing (especially if their expenses are being covered by parents or trust funds or such.)

Yup, that's what they do all do. Eat pringles and xp like the rest of us. >_> C'mon, pull your head out of your ***, it's a job, it's rarely fun I'm sure.

Sidenote: Calling the helpline is nice if you live in San Diego, (858)is my area code too. No long distance charges rocks. =D

I live in san diego, and believe me, 10 bucks an hour will not help you cover cost of living. It might pay for gas... I get paid about twice that at my job, and that's about enough to pay my monthly mortgage.

Edited, Thu Oct 20 23:13:28 2005 by mattimus

Wow, way to be an asshat.