-Promotes the wrong people to senior positions who aren’t cut out for leadership. Most leads completely ignore ideas that aren’t theirs, even when the rest of the team is enthusiastic about something. Maybe one or two are actually open to working on ideas that come from the team, but creativity is gone with no sense of ownership over your work. The games lack originality and almost nobody in the studio aside from QA bother to play them.
-Too many dead weight colleagues. No enthusiasm for their work at all, hunch over their phones or scroll through socials all day, or just don’t care enough to produce updates that work.
-The hiring and promotion process is terrible. Many bad hires within the last few years at all levels driven by desperation to grow the studio. Some really bad promotion decisions, either promoting the wrong people to positions they aren’t cut out for, or stalling promotions and recognition for the people who have earned it most.
-KPIs are low and Product are clueless as to why, usually just push to monetise even more aggressively. Engineers are forced to waste time with ads sdks, banner ads that litter the screen, shadily hiding ad close buttons, or aggressively monetising events to squeeze more money out instead of actually making the games better. You will not be empowered to create something special here, instead you’re viewed as a means to achieving somebody else’s flawed vision.
-The studio is built on F2P, but there is no understanding of how to create engaging mobile games, efforts to learn and iterate are overridden by leads/product. The studio has survived by cloning its own biggest success and saturated its own market. The games become more and more frustrating the more you play, rather than more and more fun. Everybody here knows this but the decision makers still think aggressive monetisation is the way forward.
-Bad work culture of having less than a year to create a game before launch. Some people were crunching for most of last year. More development time would mean more successful high quality games and happier employees.
-Studio has a habit of losing talent. Almost all of the most senior talent has left the studio over the course of past 4 or 5 years. All moved on to better things because the studio didn’t recognise or empower them, it’s so difficult to replace these people. Also 5 out of the 6 previous directors left to found a rival studio last year, they saw the decline and jumped ship.
