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[Ryland]

I'm not hiring yet, which is why this isn't in the Paid Work subforum. This is a question about what I should offer once I do.

I'm probably going to be hiring a pixel artist pretty soon for my game, but I don't know how much they are generally paid. I assume an hourly is preferred over per-sprite.

I'd be looking for small sprites that would probably be scaled up. I'm thinking most sprites would be around the 16x16 pixel range, depending on what the artist is comfortable with, but the artist may vary the size for different monsters if they think it would look better. Tiles would obviously all have to be the same size.

Things like monsters and the player would be animated (walk cycles, attacking,) and in a top-down (actually 3/4) projection (I mention this because I've heard it's harder to do than a platformer's projection.)

So, if any artists could tell me what their rate would be for this project, that'd be great. And if there's anything important I left out that could affect the price, let me know. Thanks!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i imagine it depends on how good the pixel artist is, and how famous. if you want someone who has worked on other games or has name recognition you'd have to pay a lot. i don't think it's different than any other game artist -- i mean, i'd expect comparable rates for pixel artists and non-pixel artists. pixel art is a style

it's sort of like asking "how much do java programmers make" rather than "how much do programmers make" -- the language is usually irrelevant to the price

[Ryland]

i imagine it depends on how good the pixel artist is, and how famous. if you want someone who has worked on other games or has name recognition you'd have to pay a lot. i don't think it's different than any other game artist -- i mean, i'd expect comparable rates for pixel artists and non-pixel artists. pixel art is a style

it's sort of like asking "how much do java programmers make" rather than "how much do programmers make" -- the language is usually irrelevant to the price

I actually get much more money doing Python development than PHP development. But I think it's less to do with the language, and more to do with the fact that PHP developers are a lot easier to find.

I think you might be right on this about art, though. The reason I specified pixel art was because I don't know anything about art and didn't want to make many assumptions. I'd still like to hear what experienced (as in have been paid for pixel art,) pixel artists, though.

[SterlingDee]

Well, you can probably negotiate a flat fee for all the assets you want. Really, you have the money, so you make the call (they can take it or leave it). As someone else mentioned, it depends on the quality of the art. In some cases, pixel art can be easier to pump out than many types of hi-res art (not all cases though!).

[Soulliard]

I've been wondering about this as well (but about artists in general, not specific to pixel artists).

I realize that payments are going to vary a lot between projects and artists. But it would be helpful if I had some idea of what a fair price would be. What sort of numbers should I consider as a starting point?

[thorn]

When I have been contracted to provide sprite and pixel art in the past, I generally charge around $800 per day or in some cases where I feel the project has a very high likelihood of success - I offer a reduced per day rate with a royalty agreement attached to to the finished product. I've been paid at this rate on 3-4 projects over the years, I provide a whole host of creative services, but at that rate I do characters, character animations, emotes, backgrounds, effects, etc.

YMMV though. Lot of hungry talent out there.

[Konidias]

$800 a day? Really? That seems a bit insane. If you work 8 hour days that's $100 an hour... That would be more than what any seasoned professional animators make at Disney/Pixar.

I would say a good rough range for artists (not just pixel artists, but any artist) is going to be anywhere between $20-$40 per hour. Any more than that and the artist better be award winning.

$40 per hour being on the higher end of the scale... someone with experience who works quickly. $20 or less and you're looking at students with little experience and probably not the best skill (or they are just hungry for work and are willing to get less). It also really depends on the area... but I can't imagine some artist doing freelance work online would charge over $40 an hour. Definitely not $100 an hour.

Trust me on this... I'm a professional artist and know probably a hundred other professional artists, and I have a pretty good idea of what most of them get paid.

These are US west coast rates though... for other parts of the world the amount might be more or less. Like central US or eastern US you might get away with paying them $5-$10 per hour less because the cost of living isn't as high.

Though there is no way I'd ever pay an artist $100 per hour. That's straight up robbery. No artist makes $200,000 a year.

[team_q]

Nah buddy, I know as a programmer, the cost to a client from my company for my services is higher generally then what thorn posted, I personally don't get a salary anywhere near that amount, but that's how it shakes out. It kinda depends on the job. You are thinking in terms of salary, not in terms of hiring work from another company(freelancer business). Remember, you need to cover the lean times, additional resources required for running your own business and future proofing the buisness.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

prices on artists vary a lot. i've known indies who hire kids off deviantart for very little. generally you get what you pay for; the more you pay, the higher quality artist who is willing to work for that amount

and yes, people don't realize the hidden costs to freelancers. freelancers need to pay for their software. they need to pay self-employment tax. hiring someone to work at your company doesn't have those costs. it's a lot different to pay an artist to use your company's copy of photoshop or 3dstudiomax, vs paying an artist to work on your game using their own copy -- they had to pay for those copies, and they aren't cheap (same thing with musicians and music software / soundfonts / etc. -- music software isn't cheap)

my father is a painter (on canvas, he doesn't use computers) and people are always surprised how much paintings cost. they offer ridiculously low amounts like $400 for a painting. $400 doesn't even cover the cost of materials: the paint, the canvas, the frame, etc., to say nothing of his time. those things are expensive. to buy a painting from an artist for $400 is basically asking him to give *you* money

[Konidias]

Yeah but pixel art is not painting on canvas or programming. You can make pixel art with msPaint. (in fact it's pretty much all I used for the longest time) I'm assuming anyone who makes pixel art for a living, would already have everything they need to make art without needing to buy software or additional materials.

What software do you really need to buy to make pixel art? There is fantastic free software out there for pixel art... You can't seriously be telling me that you justify $800 a day because you have to buy software.

You can buy an entire computer for $800 and make damn fine pixel art on it. Sure you still need to usually pay your own health care and pay a big chunk to taxes, but I just don't see how you can justify $800 is a reasonable amount to earn per day as a pixel artist. That's just insane.

I don't come anywhere near costing $800 a day and I work for a huge company with a computer provided to me and benefits/cheap healthcare.

I understand that freelancers feel the need to charge more because they don't have super steady work... but you can't put that on clients. "Oh, I haven't had work in a couple of weeks, so I'm going to charge you more to cover for that"

Programmers cost far more than artists... canvas painting is expensive... but nobody is going to tell me pixel art is expensive to make to the point of justifying $800 a day.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

actually professional pixel artists do use specialized software for it, such as cosmigo pro motion (which isn't super expensive, but it's not cheap either). i'd never hire anyone who would do their pixel art in ms paint, haha. also, pixel art is often animated rather than static, and for that you often need animation software (for testing out the animation to see if it's fluid)

pixel artists have the same computer needs as other artists -- they need larger monitors, multiple monitor setups, they need a graphics tablet, etc.

i recently heard that the fighting game skullgirls, which isn't pixel art but uses simple 2D animation, has to pay $150,000 to the (outsourced) artists *per character*. of course that's an extreme example because each character has about a thousand frames of animation (so it comes out to about $150 per frame), but still, it gives you a sense for what people are making

freelancing tends to be more expensive than what you'd expect compared to someone in an equivalent job making a salary. if you hire a professional freelance ghostwriter to write a book for you, they don't require special software for it, but they are still going to charge and arm and a leg (tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars) to write it. whereas if you are employing a newspaper or magazine writer, you pay much less than that for an equivalent amount of writing

but again this is just for people who do freelancing professionally. if you want to pay less for lesser quality i'm sure there'd be a lot of takers. but they wouldn't be professionals -- meaning they might not be very good at it, might have a poor work ethic and not finish it on time or at all, and so on

[Miguelito]

It also depends on your schedule.
Basic scenario - if you have a super-urgent thing to be done, you need to find someone to work full-time. Which, if my impression is correct, is not the rule for pixel artists. If you do pixel art on the side, then you can afford to ask a bit less and work more relaxed. But as soon as you go full-time, then your livelihood depends on it, and prices will necessarily go up.

So I'd expect full-time freelancers to be priced higher than evening artists.

[nikki]

I do freelance jobs, the starting rate for me is 50 euro (65$) .

But I live in west europe, I suppose you can get freelancers for less then that in other regions.

[Muz]

Depends on where they live too. Someone in Indonesia or India costs way, way less than someone in Australia/UK. Like in Malaysia, $15 per hour is what you'd expect after 3-5 years of full time employment.

Good ones are probably fully employed, so they're fine with charging 2x-10x their market price because they don't need to do it, and it cuts into their entertainment/relaxation time.

Plus, from experience, freelance jobs are a bitch. More so with design jobs. A lot of people who hire designers expect endless tweaks (move that a few pixel up, make it a little more bluish, one of his eyes should be bigger than the other).

Doing a good job takes say... 2 hours. Tweaking something to perfection takes say... a month, and will usually look worse than the two hour job. People who hire freelancers are even more likely to have unreasonable demands when they're. This is extremely frustrating. Experienced designers will usually charge per tweak or claim that they need a week to do a 2 hour job to make it look difficult to tweak.


So they often have the choice of "padding" their hourly wage and adding restrictions or charging strictly by time spent.

How would you feel if you paid someone $20/hour to draw a character and it looked nothing like the theme you were going for? You'd get annoyed if they charged extra for the 40 hours it would take to fix it, but not so much if they charged you about $100/hour, claimed it for 5 hours, but did the 30 hours of fixes for almost free (limited to 3 revisions or something).

You can also get a lot lower price for first-time freelancers who want to build a portfolio, but at the risk of them not being very good at all or being unable to finish the job. Seeing how frustrating freelancing gets, a lot of them would quit in the middle of the job.

Personally, having done a bunch of freelance work, I'd much rather not go through it again... projects extending 3x the client's expectations are perfectly normal. That's not even including the month or so spent negotiating requirements or waiting for them to do their side of the agreement. Looking back, I'd charge 5x what I had originally offered for most of those jobs.

[Konidias]

i'd never hire anyone who would do their pixel art in ms paint, haha.

This coming from the guy who says he'd hire a guy who only communicates via morse code?

If the end result is the same, why should you care what they use? I feel like you're just trying to make claims to further strengthen your point, even though the claims are actually backwards to what you really believe.

I honestly don't care what an artist uses as long as they are fast and the work is good. Why should it matter?

I'm still failing to see the justification behind $800 a day though. Even with added costs of software (graphics gale is a whopping $20... is that still not good enough?) and hardware ($600 for 2 top end 27" monitors... $1000 for a great computer that could handle any pixel art... $1600 total) I still can't justify paying a digital artist $100 an hour.

Maybe it's just me... I mean I only know a few artist friends who make that kind of money and they are working for top animation studios... they definitely aren't freelancing.

Even people I know in the vfx/animation industry with lead freelance positions aren't making $100 an hour. More like $60-$80... and this is California where rates are generally higher than anywhere else. (hence why so much stuff is being outsourced)

[dhondon]

Interesting discussion. I usually charge between 30-35$/h.

[J-Snake]

I talked with a freelancer who looked very skilled to me. He wanted 25 Dollar for one tile.

[rivon]

How big tile, lol?

[Sniperrr]

a guy in the mugen community charged 2000 bucks for a sprite char set commission and given how hard fighting game spriting is i think he was way undercharging (mind you i may have forgotten the actual number but it was in the thousands)

also if you're particularly good at pixelling, if you're good at what you do you do a lot of detail or assets or you need to do some especially fluid animation, then i think 800 dollars isn't really unjustified

[Conker534]

I was hired for a few games at $15-25 a hour.

But I suck.

I wouldn't hire me.