Would not recommend - Art Director Dontnod Employee Review

A lot to say really… Dontnod suffers from many cultural issues that leadership is aware of but does not meaningfully address. Concerns are often deflected or minimized rather than resolved. The studio culture has significantly declined from what it was a decade ago, caused by a lot of bad recruitment and top management decisions in this timeframe. -HR investigations into workplace behavior complaints have historically resulted in no meaningful action or accountability, Often resulting in unnecessary corporate gaslighting. - Same problem with middle management, accountability is not their priority, and prefer to blame content creation teams over being constructive or recognize mistakes or bad plannings on their end. Middle management largely prefers excessive micromanagement and interfering with departments processes over trust from more experienced team mates: relies more on toxic or inappropriate punchlines or target team members than their own accountability. Doing meetings with some producers on an Action RPG project was an absolute nightmare to deal with, from how absent the minimum required management skill set was on some discussions. A literal void. - Toxic behaviors has been normalized to the point where it's joked about by those who enabled it. These individuals often remain protected and have been promoted at director levels despite repeated complaints. - Average contributors being promoted as project directors without any consultations or against advices being made by more senior director staff. A lot of politics in play. - Speaking up about problems can result in retaliation. - In my time there, i noticed high disconnection between content creation teams and top management on culture and meaningful ways to correct course. It’s a never ending political fight when you want to protect your team from absolute bad decisions. - Worst PR embodiement i have seen. Some execs talking publicly (interviews and/or social media accounts) should be restrained to talk publicly or trained better to not alter studio's public image. - Technical debt is through the roof. You can find many contributors working on the same tools, resulting in no high level collaboration or meaningful exchange of knowledge, resulting in siloed projects with no awareness of what is currently being developped on other projects. No healthy collaborations between projects due to political factors or bad decisions sealing communications between projects. - Burnout is common and treated as an individual problem rather than a systemic one. - Inefficient or useless departments layered between management and content creation teams. - High attrition of senior talent over the past several years. Many experienced contributors have left resulting in quality loss across departments, affecting project overall quality and trust. - Promote good culture publicly but happily retaliates on employees when things are going south. Very performative stance on this front.