Pros
- The people - you'll work with some of the friendliest, funniest, most passionate people you'll ever meet. Everyone's trying to make the best games possible and keeping each other sane. - The IPs - you get the opportunity to work with all kinds of licenses, from Marvel to Pixar to Star Wars to DC, etc. There's really nothing like it when one of your favourite licenses rolls around and you get to work on content for it. - Variety in projects - you won't be bored working on one thing for 18 months at a time, because the projects roll thick and fast. - Portfolio builder - you'll get multiple titles for your portfolio within a year or two - Paid overtime - during crunch you're paid overtime, otherwise you accrue extra hours as flexitime. You will likely stock up on these quickly. - Secure - never seems to be any sign of slowing down.
Cons
- The people - the old-guard range from 'stuck in their ways' to 'difficult to work with' to just plain useless. Conversely, most of the workforce are so fresh from uni they're still figuring it all out in the first place. There are some incomprehensibly enormous egos to contend with across the board. - The processes - communication between departments, or even within departments, is shambolic. "Us and them" attitudes permeate every aspect of the job, whether it be other disciplines or other studios or even other teams within the same discipline. Collaboration does not exist on a project-wide scale, it is up to individuals to really push it - those who do are a pleasure to work with, but they're the minority. Production try to schedule projects, but that's kind of impossible given how tight the project timelines are. - The tools - just awful. - The deadlines - the company pumps games out at a rate of 3-4 per year across two studios. That means you're pumping out a game what, every 9 months? That comes at a human cost. One option is you're putting the extra hours in, because it is literally impossible to make a game working 7.5 hours a day for that amount of time. The other option is that you are not doing this, meaning the work just gets lumped on your teammates instead. There's very little explicit mandatory overtime or anything like that, but if you don't get your work done, no one else will, or one of the core 30 people who never seem to leave the office will have to do it. And that's that. - The location - Knutsford is a crap place to live for anyone under 60. If you can't drive, you're really trapped, as the public transport is run as if it were an optional nicety. It's almost as if it's purposefully isolated from other games studios so you can't get any perspective. - The pay - it's low. - Upward mobility - seemingly almost entirely random. Sometimes people who are bad at their job are promoted just to keep them out of the way. Different teams have wildly different processes and expectations for how and when people are promoted. - No room to innovate - titles come out so frequently that there's hardly any room for creativity from anyone other than directors. Your job will most likely be adapting something from a previous title into a new one, which is always weirdly difficult despite how common an occurrence it is - Training - what training? No time to train newbies when another game is always 6 months from release.