Work from home perks but stagnant salaries and HR issues - Production Artist High 5 Games Employee Review

Great company, great people. Can be hectic sometimes but getting paid well for what I do.

No cons for me e

Work-life balance is pretty great. Company culture is the best part of being here. The people here are very friendly and fun to work with. They and their talent are what make this company great- even for a remote company. Comfortable place to work depending on your job position. This job is a good stepping stone for people who are just getting their foot in the door into a game/tech company and need that initial experience. We are exploring AI-assisted workflows for various roles in the company if that's your thing. This is giving us the opportunity to build games outside of our long-outdated game engine.

The company direction is not always transparent to lower-level employees. Business direction and decisions are sometimes terrible. Efforts to innovate in the casino game industry often fall through due to bad ideas/lack of planning. Context: We spent a whole year building a new platform while rapidly producing a catalogue of games for it only for it to immediately flop because distributors wouldn't market it the way we expected they would. The CEO may fire leads on a whim without any regard to the disarray it causes to the teams that relied on those individuals. Job offshoring is becoming common here as the CEO once proclaimed after going fully remote that High 5 Games is now an "international company". HR regimes keep changing on a yearly basis while each one slowly tightens their grip on company policies on what were once generous and employee-first policies. Work can be extremely repetitive depending on what your position in the company is. Layoffs can happen at least once a year depending on what's going on. Bad financial/legal decisions in the past have recently put this company into a hole it's trying to dig itself out of (as of 2025-2026). Huge AI push leading to an unknown future for jobs/talent/growth in the company. Bonuses stopped being given out many years ago. Wage increases have been frozen for 2 years now. No end in sight as of June 2026. Additionally, yearly PTO earnings for all employees have been reduced by a fraction as of the start of 2026. As of this year, medical insurance is now from a marketplace that each employee must select from. The company pays up to a certain amount for premiums, but the policies are mostly terrible compared to the plans the company offered us prior. While the production teams have talent and have been putting a lot of good effort into the games that the company releases, it doesn't change the fact that High 5 Games has been on a slow downward trajectory for at least 10 years or so largely due to leadership decisions.