Pros
Good game-focused and approachable coworkers were the biggest benefit to this company. Medical, dental, and vision benefits were excellent. The company aims to create games targeted toward younger audiences, so much of the artwork and storyboard are simplistic and cutesy. The early company was home to only a handful of employees (many who worked remotely), and were macro-managed (not micro-managed) by the owner: A general direction for the games were given, and creative license was highly encouraged. The company was bought by investors, with some management shifts. The workforce more than doubled in size, adding in managers and many more roles, such as Game Developers, designers, artists, project managers, QA, and HR. The culture was changed gradually from a highly collaborative environment (everyone had equal say in designs and ideas) to more rigid chain-of-command. This was both a good and bad thing: With so many people contributing ideas, games tended to balloon and goals were vague. With the restructure, only a handful of decision-makers set the direction of projects, but with the cost that feedback from the non-management employees was largely disregarded. The company boasts a wide assortment of games. Many are, admittedly, boilerplate. This turned out to be a selling point for both parents and programmers alike: Parents knew what to expect from the new releases, and programmers could reuse frameworks quickly and ship a new title nearly every month. With the increase in workforce and addition of new talent, much higher-caliber games were created: these projects took much longer to complete (years instead of months), due in part to feature creep and redesigns, but player retention was higher and games were made more profitable.
Cons
Before the acquisition by investors, brainstorm sessions included all members of the project, and deciding votes were held by the owner, the lead programmer, and lead artist. Feature creep and redesigns occurred, of course, but were usually minor and did not severely impact project release deadlines. The incoming investors were given authority equal that of the owner, and they -- in addition to new managers -- decided on games, balancing factors, monetization strategies, and team members working on each project. They rarely agreed. The only thing they wanted is for games to be "fun". Each disagreed on what "fun" entailed. As gameplay feedback/statistics trickled in, instant adjustments to games were demanded: some were minor alterations; many were almost complete redesigns. The Bosses rarely settled, or agreed, on features, and projects that had been originally pitched to take 3-4 months dragged on for 1-2 years before being published. Feedback from anyone below management was largely disregarded. All projects received whim-of-the-day and whim-of-the-week "suggestions" by The Bosses and management (whose suggestions often contradicted those of The Bosses), and after a week or two's worth of implementation, the ideas were tested, considered "not fun enough" and scrapped. Finger-pointing ensued by management in order to cover their own butts. As the size of teams increased, "10-minute" scrum meetings were instituted. Managers insisted on being present in all meetings, instead of leaving the responsibility to project leads. To save time, these individual meetings were all merged into a daily company-wide meeting. Each of these new "10-minute stand-up" meeting lasted nearly an hour. Every day. This continued for over 6 months, until management received enough backlash from employees to make the meetings shorter and more project-specific. At that point, scrum meetings were all but scrapped entirely, as a passive-aggressive gesture from those managers as though it had been a personal attack. The company went through an explosive hiring frenzy. When projects were delayed and ROI wasn't up to par with projections, layoffs ensued. Sadly, a lot of amazing talent was lost in the process. The management layer was unaffected.