Video Game Design Degrees, Ranked on What Graduates Get

The degree

What a Game Design Degree Teaches

The Department of Education's definition of a game design program describes one that "focuses on the design, development, and programming of interactive media entertainment, including computer and video games, virtual environments, Internet applications, and other interactive media." It lists instruction in "theory of games, turn-based games, real-time games, visual and interactive design, story development, animation, simulation, and programming."

That's a wide list, and schools cut it in different ways. Some game design programs sit inside an art school and lean on drawing, 3D modeling and animation. Others sit in a computer science department and expect you to write C++ by your second year. Most land in between. You'll learn how rules create choices, how a level teaches a player without a tutorial, and how to run a playtest and act on what you see.

The quickest way to tell which kind of program you're looking at is the course list for the first two years. If it's full of drawing studios, it's an art program. If it's full of calculus and data structures, it's a programming program with a design label. Neither is wrong. They lead to different jobs, which is why this site ranks game development degrees and animation schools separately from the best game design schools.

Four fields

Game Design, Game Programming, Simulation or Animation

Nearly every degree a future game maker would look at falls into one of four fields. Here's how many programs each one has.

Game design is the core of this site, with 116 programs. Animation is the largest field, at 187, because it covers film, TV and visual effects programs as well as games. Simulation programs, 30 of them, build virtual environments and often teach the same engines games use. Computer game programming is the smallest, at 21, and the most technical: it's a computer science degree, not an arts degree.

Designers decide what a game does. Developers make it run. Artists make it look and move right. If you're not sure which side of that line you're on, game design vs. game development walks through the courses and the jobs on each side.

Pay

What Game Design Jobs Pay

BLS doesn't publish a game designer salary. Its wage survey counts occupations, not industries, so a game designer is counted with web and digital interface designers and a game developer with software developers. O*NET, the Labor Department's job database, files video game designers under that interface designer code. Here's what each occupation paid nationally in May 2025:

Read these as each occupation's pay, not as a studio's offer. The interface designer group includes web and user interface designers, so its $104,000 median describes the whole occupation, not game studios alone. The spread matters more than the median: the lowest-paid 10% of that group earn under $53,750, and the top 10% earn over $201,550.

The outlook differs a lot by job. BLS projects software developers to grow 10.2% between 2025 and 2035, against 3.5% for all jobs. For special effects artists and animators it projects a small decline, 0.3%. If you're choosing between the art track and the programming track, that difference is worth more weight than a few thousand dollars of median pay. The video game designer salary page breaks the designer figure down by state.