Game audio is changing quickly. More of the work is moving outside game studios, freelance careers are becoming more common, and new technology is changing the way people think about sound design.

That is the broad picture that emerges from the GameSoundCon Game Audio Industry Survey 2025, which collected responses from 654 people, including 631 game-audio professionals.

GameSoundCon deserves a lot of credit for taking the industry’s temperature and sharing the results. Its survey gives sound designers, composers, technical audio designers, studios, educators, and companies something useful to work from. The event itself does the same thing in person: it gives the game-audio community a place to meet, compare notes, and share the practical knowledge that rarely appears in a press release.

We are not attending GameSoundCon in person this year, but we still support it and think it does an excellent job for the game-audio community. It remains one of the best places to take the industry’s temperature and to celebrate the people making game audio better.

We took a look at the survey results to see what kind of picture emerges.

More work is happening outside the studio

One of the clearest changes in the survey is the movement of audio work beyond the traditional in-house studio team.

In 2016, 5% of respondents reported working for an audio company. In the 2025 survey, that figure was 14.7%. Employment by a game company remained the largest category at 46.7%, but the growth of audio-company employment points to a more distributed production model.

The accompanying chart tracks this split across 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2025. The direction is consistent across the period: the share of respondents working for audio companies grows as the share working for game companies falls.

In-house audio teams remain important, while more work is shared between game studios, specialist audio companies, freelancers, and other external partners. A game-audio career may now involve moving between all of those environments instead of following one stable path inside a single studio.

That shift creates opportunities. Specialist teams can bring deep experience to a project. Freelancers can build varied portfolios. Small studios can access skills they could not support permanently.

It also asks more from the people doing the work. They need to adapt to different pipelines, communicate clearly across teams, and keep a reliable workflow even when the surrounding production changes. Nobody wants to rebuild their entire setup every time a new project starts.

Layoffs and the structure of freelance work

The survey also shows why “freelance” should not be treated as a simple alternative to employment.

Sixteen percent of respondents reported being laid off during the previous 12 months. Of those respondents, 46% had found another game-audio job, 30% were still looking for work, and 18% were freelancing.

At the same time, many people freelance by choice. Among full-time freelancers, 51% said they preferred freelancing to employment. Another 28% said they would prefer employment, while 16% had entered full-time freelancing after a recent layoff.

Those figures describe a field where freelance work is both a preferred way of working and a response to insecurity. Both things can be true. Someone can value independence, variety, and control while still wishing for a more stable income or a permanent role.

For freelancers, tools are part of the infrastructure of the job. A good setup needs to support quick experiments, repeatable results, and hand-offs between people who may never share an office. Presets, reusable chains, modulation systems, and consistent interfaces are not luxuries. They help a personal workflow survive changing briefs and changing clients.

AI is arriving carefully

Generative AI is part of the conversation, but the survey does not suggest that it has taken over game-audio production.

Eight percent of professional respondents said they were currently using generative AI, while 15% were exploring its use. Among those already using it, 43% reported using it for placeholder dialogue.

That picture is more measured than many headlines suggest. AI is present, but adoption is still limited. Its most visible use in this survey is practical and provisional: helping teams create material that can stand in during development while decisions are still being made.

The cautious numbers make sense. Game audio is tied closely to performance, timing, interaction, authorship, and the specific needs of a project. Generating material quickly is not the same as solving the creative or production problem that material needs to serve.

For now, the survey points to experimentation rather than wholesale replacement. The useful questions are practical ones: where does it help, how do you control the result, and how do you keep creative responsibility with the people making the work?

Useful benchmarks, with important limits

The survey includes salary and freelance-rate data that can provide useful benchmarks. It also shows why you should treat those numbers as context, not a price list.

Among employees in the United States and Canada, the reported average salary was $155,198, with a median of $127,070. The average was 20% above the 2023 average of $128,511. In the EU and UK, the reported average was $71,388, with a median of $62,500. The regional difference is substantial, and the gap between average and median in both regions shows how much a small number of higher salaries can affect the headline figure.

Role matters too. In the United States and Canada, the reported average salary was $124,277 for sound designers, $131,686 for composers, and $165,331 for audio directors. In the EU and UK, the corresponding averages were $58,566, $63,236, and $99,796.

The picture is less positive for recent hires. The reported US/Canada average for employees with two or fewer years of experience was $63,457, compared with $79,012 in 2023. That comparison covers a specific experience group, so it should not be read as a measure of overall salary movement.

Freelance rates vary by project type and level of production. Among composers charging by finished minute, the reported average was $1,871 for AAA work, $998 for midcore work, and $618 for indie work. Compared with 2023, those averages were up 3%, 8%, and 5%, respectively. The medians moved differently: AAA was up 12%, midcore was up 67%, and indie was down 13%. These figures are useful reference points, not universal prices. Scope, rights, revisions, delivery requirements, location, experience, and the relationship between the client and contractor all matter.

The survey also notes that income questions were optional. It reports income or rates from 95% of salaried employees and 88% of freelancers, so these figures should be read as informed benchmarks rather than a complete census of the field.

Education and representation in the survey

The survey reports a high level of formal education among respondents. Seventy-seven percent of professional respondents reported having a music- or audio-related degree. Among recent hires, more than 90% had a sound- or music-related qualification, and 35% had majored or minored in game audio.

These figures describe the educational backgrounds represented in the survey. They do not establish that a degree is required for a career in game audio, or that formal education is the only route into the field.

The survey also records the gender and ethnicity of respondents. Eighty-two percent identified as male, 15% as female, and 3% as non-binary. Seventy-five percent identified as White or Caucasian, unchanged from 2023. The 2025 figures for Latino or Hispanic respondents, Asian respondents, and Black respondents were 8%, 6%, and 3%, compared with 9%, 7%, and 2% in 2023.

The Game Audio Diversity Alliance (GADA) is working on this part of the picture through education, mentoring, networking, and financial support. Kilohearts sponsors GADA, and we wrote about the partnership and its scholarship work in Supporting the Future of Game Audio: Kilohearts x GADA.

These figures are one part of the wider conversation around education, access, and representation in game audio.

Why GameSoundCon matters

The survey points to an industry reorganising around studios, audio companies, and independent professionals.

Work is moving between studios, outsourcing companies, and independent professionals. Freelancing is becoming a lasting part of the production landscape. AI is entering the workflow, but cautiously. Salaries and rates provide useful benchmarks while also reflecting major regional and role-based differences. The survey also records a highly educated respondent group and a field whose gender balance has changed over time.

GameSoundCon matters because it gives this changing community somewhere to compare notes. The survey makes the larger trends visible. The event brings people together to talk about the details: how teams work, how tools are changing, how careers develop, and what people entering the industry need.

That wider community support matters to us too. We have worked with AirWiggles, which gives game and film audio people a free place to find events, challenges, resources, and one another.

How Kilohearts can help

We are proud to support GameSoundCon and the people working in game audio. We have been making tools for sound designers and musicians for a long time, and we know that the best workflow is rarely the same for everyone. A large studio, an independent sound designer, and a small team all need to move quickly without giving up control.

Phase Plant, Snap Heap, and Multipass can work as focused tools on their own or as parts of a larger, reusable setup. That matters when the next brief, client, or studio pipeline is different from the last one.

These are not hypothetical workflows. Game-audio designers are already using Kilohearts tools in professional productions, from AAA sound design to studio audio teams. Read Aaron Wolff on procedural sound design with Phase Plant, or see how the Hazelight audio team approaches tools and workflow.

That is where Kilohearts fits in. Our ecosystem of hosts and effects is built to make experimentation fast, keep complex processing manageable, and help people save workflows they can use again and again. We also try to make those tools easier to explore through community projects, educational content, and free material such as Marshall McGee’s Snap Heap and Multipass presets. We will have more game-audio presets and resources to link to as they arrive.

The Kilohearts Subscription is useful for trying that workflow without committing to a large upfront purchase. It is $9.99 per month, includes the full Kilohearts collection and Content Banks, and has no annual commitment. You can pause it when a project ends and come back when you need the tools again.

Whether you are working inside a large production, moving between freelance projects, or learning the craft on your own, the goal is simple: spend less time fighting the setup and more time making the sound work.

Game audio is under pressure. It is also full of skilled people, new ideas, and communities committed to helping the field grow. GameSoundCon helps make those changes visible, and gives the people shaping the future of game audio a place to do it together.

Source

All survey figures in this article come from the GameSoundCon Game Audio Industry Survey 2025. The survey was conducted from May 1 to June 15, 2025. It included 654 total respondents and 631 game-audio professionals. The survey was not a randomly sampled census, and some questions had optional responses; readers should treat the figures as reported industry indicators rather than universal totals.

This article is part of Kilohearts Game Audio Week 2026, a series of interviews, practical ideas, community stories, and tools for people working in game audio.