A great company, killed by greed.
Pros
When I first started at NM it was a fantastic company to work for. It had just begun to spin off from it's world-beating animation tech into the cut-throat world of games - first console, then mobile. I worked with amazing people in the Oxford studio, there was great team spirit and it was a fun place to work. I made friendships there that treasure to this day. I worked with team leads that really knew their stuff and I learnt things that really helped me in my future career. In the early days the senior management was generous, if somewhat overbearing and we made some good titles. The mantra of the studio was 'It's ready when it's ready', and that served us very well. I mentally split my time at NM into two parts, and the first part was one of the best times of my professional career.
Cons
A lot of people blame the Zynga takeover for what happened to NM, but in truth the seeds for the later destruction were planted far earlier. With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that management were angling for a sale well before Zynga came along, probably as early as the original launch of CSR Racing, if not earlier. There was a slow creep, shaping the company into something that would appeal to a bigger company like Zynga; the sudden elevation of 'metrics' as gospel above gameplay, the cancellation of a title in soft launch because it wasn't a smash hit and might taint the slate in the eyes of a buyer, the sudden explosion in HR representatives gradually used as a hammer against the employees and the largely-unheralded cancellation of a number of projects in San-Francisco. We didn't really notice it at the time because things were generally still pretty good, but the snowball had started rolling down the mountain. I may be naive, but I honestly believed Don Mattrick when he said that Zynga post-buyout would mostly leave us alone to do our thing. I do honestly believe that was the plan, after all - NM had established success on mobile and Zynga didn't, so it made sense to leave the newly purchased goose to lay the Free-to-Play-Golden Egg. Then Pincus turfed Mattrick through their revolving CEO door and Zynga began to revert to type. Still, for a time Zynga mostly gave NM a long leash. The problem was that Torsten and the other senior management had sold Zynga on a false prospectus. Our previous mantra of 'It's ready when it's ready' was never going to be music to a publicly-traded company's ears. Internally we all knew that none of our major new titles were really ready for release at the time of sale. In short, what really killed NM wasn't direct Zynga meddling, it was NM senior management having to try and completely retrofit the company into a 'crank-it-out-quick-and-bump-the-stock' company after the fact. This lead to a rapid increase on work pressure, huge increases in crunch time, the aforementioned explosion of 'Product Managers' over every flat surface in the company. NM turned its face from making games that people enjoyed playing towards desperately trying to pretend to Zynga that everything was okay. The fact that Dawn of Titans (developed by the first neglected, then horrifically mismanaged London studio) was the first poster-child project chosen by Zynga only made things worse. Whoever had given them their figures, Zynga's expectations for the game were insanely optimistic. A culture of 'lying upwards' was established, where all that mattered was making the people above you in the chain happy, no matter the personal or professional cost. Senior management refused to listen to any problems, instead adopting a bizarre 'Stepford smiler' attitude where everything was great and every project was doing perfect and an amazing Dawn of Titans release was just around the corner, swear to God. Torsten eventually moved from Oxford down to London and essentially forgot the Oxford studio existed. We withered on the corporate vine while more and more resources vanished into the production black hole that was London. Eventually this lead to a slow yet enormous talent exodus which gradually picked up speed. Those experienced people who pointed out problems and suggested improvements, were forced out as 'not team players', while those who showed unquestioning loyalty got bumped up to positions they couldn't in fact handle. With titles stuck in development hell due to 'too many cooks' syndrome, Zynga began to grow impatient and thus began to parachute in their own project managers to attempt to right a ship that was, in truth, already fatally holed below the waterline. Their attempts to fix something they never understood at all only made things worse and so we find ourselves here, with the original studio shuttered, massive talent scattered to the wind and amazing tech and the minds that made it being squandered. Ultimately, NM and Zynga were two companies that should never have been paired together. Senior management got their payday, and in the process killed something very, very special. I just hope that everyone let go finds new and better employers. If you're thinking of working for what's left of NM: don't.