Game Developer • Former Employee
Pros: - Nice people
- Great benefits
- Good salary (although at some point you realize that you are losing your value staying in this company)
- Low stress environment
- Overall a great place to retire
Cons: TLDR: aggressive non-compete clause, lack of creative freedom, big and slow corporation, boring tasks, obsolete tech, small career advancement opportunities.
* 3-month notice period + 3-month non-compete period is not used to protect the company. Instead it is aggressively used to bully people who are quitting and scare people who are thinking of quitting. Non-compete is even applied if you go outside of the mobile game industry. This is especially damaging, because not all companies will wait 6 months to hire you.
* Work on personal projects is disallowed. Even non-commercially for self-education purposes. And you have to ask special permission to participate in game jams.
* Not many career advancement opportunities inside the Berlin studio.
* Company is being run by salesmen who have no idea how to manage creative people.
* Don't believe the promotional materials on the web. Don't fool yourself, King is a big corporation with corresponding negative traits.
* Company management does not follow the company values it has defined.
* Everything in the company happens extremely slowly. And numerous middle managers make it even worse.
* Decision making happens painfully slowly, partially because it happens in Stockholm, not locally in Berlin.
* Incompetent people in managerial positions are being kept because they are close to the studio management. It hurts the teams, but nobody says anything because they are nice guys.
* Lack of creative freedom. Most of the time you will spend cloning features from other titles, because business analysts said so.
* Business analysts have much more impact on game design than actual game designers.
* Work here is not about creating great experiences for the players, instead it is about squeezing more money from them.
* Lots of promises to improve upon negative points, but almost no action
Technology
* Obsolete game engine and legacy code slow down feature development.
* Engine team is unable to deliver quality tools.
* It is really hard to push tasks to decrease technical debt.
* Adoption of modern tools and techniques is happening at an extremely slow rate.
* Lack of technical direction. Studio actually hired a Scrum master for the role of Technical Director.
* Most of the work is simple UI changes, or cloning features from other internal titles. So very little learning opportunities.