Pros
Foreword
Playtonic will tell you what you want to hear to sign you on, but internally it’s a mess of mismanagement, clashing ideals, and financial trouble. If you want to progress your career, steer clear.
Pros
There are good people who work at this company. Unfortunately, a lot of them were recently laid off, but there are still some great people left.
Passionate and skilled individuals who are a joy to be around.
A new office as of 2025, featuring a pool table and gym.
A chance to work on a variety of different projects.
You get to interact with some of the developers behind classic games such as Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie.
The office dogs are cute.
For the majority of my time at Playtonic, the flexible work schedule was very lenient; however, they were really cracking down on this before I left, so I can’t vouch for it still being as good as it was.
Bi-weekly, hour-long mental health walks. Again, I can’t confirm that perk is still in place.
Cons
Following a big investment in the early 2020s, Playtonic rapidly scaled up but completely failed to introduce the structure required to support a larger team. People were shoved into management positions they neither wanted nor had time for, and many, myself included, were left without any management at all. No reviews, no progression, no clarity.
There’s zero room for career progression at Playtonic. People are hired into roles and stagnate there, regardless of effort or ability. For example, several junior team members carried significant responsibilities for years yet remained underpaid and without promotion.
The company is chronically underfunded due to poor decisions by upper management. During my exit interview, I was told point-blank by the CEO that they were feeling the financial consequences of multiple failed projects and dead-end investments. Raises are rare or non-existent, and it’s a badly kept secret that even senior staff are underpaid.
The design department is critically bottlenecked. Every decision requires sign-off from a single person, Gavin Price, who also holds the CEO title. Unsurprisingly, this results in major delays, inconsistent direction, and last-minute overhauls when he finally checks in. You’ll get conflicting feedback with no memory of the previous direction. I had multiple instances where I was asked to change something in a meeting, did so, and then in the next meeting was asked why I had changed it, by the same person who requested the change in the first place.
Internal decision-making is chaotic. Projects are redirected on a whim by upper management, often derailing months of work. One notable example I experienced was having a full set of signed-off designs thrown out by the CEO just weeks before a deadline, purely because he hadn’t bothered to look at them earlier and wanted things done his way instead.
There’s a constant communication breakdown between the Gavin Price and the leads of projects. Instructions are handed down without context, and when you ask your project lead for clarification, they can’t give you a reason because they weren’t given one either. The only explanation ever offered is “because the Gavin said so,” which sums up the company’s entire approach to leadership.
Creatively, the company is deeply conflicted. It was built on nostalgia, quite literally, as it was founded via a Kickstarter that relied mainly on the pedigree of Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country. Despite this, upper management constantly expressed a desire to "move on from the past" while still relying on it in every bit of marketing and investor outreach. The result was a fractured creative direction defined by identity crisis: retro or modern, familiar or new? The direction changed from meeting to meeting.
During my time at Playtonic, we cycled through multiple internal projects that were never announced or released. Each one was developed to a high standard, failed to secure publisher or investor interest, and was eventually scrapped. This rinse-and-repeat pattern went on for years until the money dried up and mass layoffs inevitably followed.
HR is extremely limited in personnel and also lacks the structure or protocols you’d expect from a company of this size.
Playtonic will likely tout its ‘Best Places to Work’ award. Don’t trust this. They’ve axed all of the things that won them that award in the first place. Initially, Playtonic did support a healthy work/life balance, with flexible hours and special days off that employees could use for life emergencies or charity work, among other perks. This was a major factor in attracting talent. But as deadlines loomed, all of these perks were gradually gutted. Management introduced mandatory in-office days and completely undermined the flexibility they once advertised so proudly. I knew staff to work evenings and weekends to meet the constantly shifting deadlines. The company couldn’t openly demand overtime due to the contracts people were hired on, so instead they weaponised tight deadlines and overwhelming workloads to pressure people into working longer and longer days.
The company culture is performative and bordered on toxic at times. Peer-to-peer policing was encouraged, with employees being watched for how long they were away from their desk, how long they chatted or how long their Microsoft Teams status was set to ‘away’. This created an atmosphere of mistrust, where people felt they had to constantly perform. I think this speaks for management’s lack of trust in the people they employ.
The main office is located in Burton upon Trent, a small, remote town. Commuting to the office is a pain due to its location, and moving to Burton is a bad idea unless you want to live in a sleepy Midlands town populated mainly by pensioners.