Strict guidelines to follow for projects that are incredibly dated, I would expect the imposed guidelines to come from a big company, like Rockstar or EA, not Dovetail. With strict guidelines comes awful cadence for tasks and projects which rival those in the industry for most intense.
The studio is incredibly understaffed and the headcount is relatively small per project, so there ends up only being a handful of people developing a title or DLC, the knock on is disconnected people and disjointed departments resulting in silos as well as individuals doing the workload of 2-3 people.
The company persists to claim that there is no crunch culture, yet the reality often appears to be the opposite.
People will gatekeep and justify high project turnaround as a means to get more money, in turn theoretically giving staff more benefits.
However, it's not common to see anyone on the ground get any bonus or benefits for a project performing well.
Morale is at an all time low, this is due to many factors. Including, amount of projects, non industry standard commodities, thriving blame culture, pressure for those to deliver even when it is unrealistic. Among others.
For some reason, pushing to get anything changed and move things in a positive direction are often met with deflection, complacency and finger pointing.
There is nothing bad in wanting a better working environment, however, it seems that somewhere people are trying to sabotage this...
There are very few incentives for employees to remain with the company. Opportunities for pay increases, promotions and personal development are practically non-existent, in some cases, stuff like pay only gets affected by minimum wage increases. Ongoing cuts significantly reduced opportunities for career progression and skills development.
At the same time, a culture of micromanagement is rampant, Employees are expected to meet targets regardless of whether workloads or deadlines are realistic or achievable.
Where meeting goals goes with slogans like, 'we need to pull together' and pulling every trick out of the hat to make you do more than you realistically should.
All of which contributed to higher-than-average staff turnover in recent years.
A lot of people feeling like they are untouchable, resulting in them being able to push around anyone to get what they want, knowing that nobody else has a say in their decision making.
There are people in several departments that use their industry knowledge and/or status/longevity within the company to act righteous and not listen to anybody else.
Communication really needs to be worked on at all levels, management seem to find it difficult to motivate, be transparent and lack care, while people at the bottom are left clueless and get blamed for not communicating something that should have effectively come from above.
Cross-departmental communication caused disfunction too, where everyone seems to be judging each other's work and a 'better than thou' attitude surfaces every time people wanted to one-up each other rather than focusing on the actual agenda.
Attempts to seek clarification frequently resulted in ambiguity. As a result, you were sometimes forced to make a decision based on limited information,
Even when answers were provided, they were often vague, dismissive, or lacked the clarity needed to move forward confidently.
Why tell people that their experience and input is valuable if you choose to ignore.
Company tends to jump on a good idea.
The proposal has no forward thinking due to them wanting to expand their IP library.
As a result, it gets rushed through approval with no foresight on how to actually plan it, making it go through production hell.
Get it green lit, then let dev do everything else, even if there is no vision, planning or direction.
It feels if someone does not like you or an inconvenience to them, you will be treated differently.
Despite decrying fairness, demanding care from others and equal respect, there seems to be an awful lack of this...
When the cameras are on, there is always a veil of positivity, but when the cameras are off and nobody else is around, you will encounter some of the most toxic behaviour, where professionalism gets swapped out for some sort of 'righteous endeavour'.
There have been redundancies, where hard working individuals have to deal with the consequences of other people's inaction.
'Trouble makers' or 'problem people' can be kicked, even if there has been no wrong-doing, meaning the company gets to be judge, jury and executioner.
Redundancies were coming, we just weren't sure when.
The whole process, while seemingly fair on the surface, there didn't really seem to be any rhyme or reason as to who got picked for redundancy, it almost seemed like picking names out of a hat.
It felt wrong to give people false hope that there may be a small chance they could keep their job.