Working at SomaTone - Anonymous employee Somatone Interactive Employee Review

Before writing this review, let's provide some context to the reviews below: 2016 was a rough year for Somatone, it's true. Somatone is highly dependent on the success of their clients and overall growth of the video game industry to succeed. When the video game industry started to really take off in 2013, Somatone grew exponentially and hired a large a number of staff. However, when the industry started to dip in 2015-2016, the studio was unable to sustain it's size with the lower workload. Unfortunately, due this and the quick shift in leadership, this situation wasn't fully explained to the staff and many were let go suddenly. This past fall, the studio has begun to rebuild itself. Now with a much smaller crew and a new manager, the company has been able to win back old clients, maintain current contracts, and develop new relationships. We have also taken steps to fix past issues; Sound Designers can showcase their work online (once the game is released of course) and pay checks are handled by an outside agency and paid on time. The past work that Somatone created was fantastic and it's unfortunate that we pushed away such great talent. But like I said, things are much better now, and I hope that we will continue to grow and create great work in the future.

The pay is decent, but could be better. But who doesn't want to be paid more?

I had quite a positive experience with while working under the management of Adam Levenson and Michael Bross. I was working offsite as a contract sound designer and my daily point of contact was Ollie Glatzer. We would have daily skype meetings. I was provided excel spreadsheet with a list of assets that needed to be made, most of which were accompanied with videos to make the creative process go smoothly, once they were complete I was given an place to upload them for review. The revision process was mostly smooth as well. I didn't ever feel overworked or that I was given more than I could handle. It was quite a nice arrangement also because I got to work on multiple different styles of games, and the other sound designers that worked onsite were incredibly help and a pleasure to work with too.

The pay was significantly lower than industry standards at other studios At some point closer to the end of my second contract a lot of people got let go and leadership changed. As a result it took me 5 months of persistently emailing the new management to finally receive payment for my overdue invoices. I was not permitted to add these sounds / videos to my Sound Design reel; nor did I receive credit for the SFX that I created, as I believe the credit went to "Somatone" and not the individual Sound Designers.