King

• 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

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.

• Create a proper balance between data analysis and creative work, or otherwise people who actually create games will continue leaving the company.
• Give freedom to game teams, including the ability to work on features that they believe are good and to choose tech on their own.
• Start listening to feedback that your employees are giving you.