Retro Studios Reviews

Healthcare is just okay Base salary/raises could be better Outdated/frustrating technology Most devs have no voice Terrible leadership Benefits were middling to bad. The only free healthcare plan available is an incredibly high deductible plan where the company contributes about 50 a month for an employee. If you want a copay plan, you'll have to cover part of the cost yourself. Nintendo of America employees have much better benefits. It's really strange how a studio owned by one of the largest and most successful game companies in the world can't afford to fully cover healthcare for the people who are creating the products they profit from. Pay is okay but needs to be much better. Again, they're part of Nintendo. There's not really an excuse to be paying people as low as they do especially for the Austin area. The year end bonuses were nice but they are not a guarantee every year. Company events are just okay. Mostly just having catered food brought into the break room. The volunteer team of employees for organizing these events works their butts off though (the CEO likes to take credit for their work). The only great benefit was being able to purchase Nintendo items at a discount through the company store. The games taking a long time isn't a factor of the studio aiming for the best quality. It's the ineptitude of management and lack of growth in the dev team. Most members of the team have been at retro for 10+ years. Many have not kept up with current game tech or pipelines. Many of the devs are still at Retro because they wouldn't be able to find a position anywhere else. While there is some talent here, this is not a place where the best in the industry stay long. Management really has no business organizing team development. The schedule is hardly adhered to and the miscommunication is constant. Very outdated pipeline. The engine is old and frustrating to work with. It lacks basic functionality of current game engines. They don't take critique of the engine very well and there aren't enough devs building the engine to make it better or actually viable. They either need to use a 3rd party engine or hire enough people to build a proper one. They say they want to hear from new people who come in, and they will let you talk about how to improve things, but nothing changes. They say they'll change and then go right back to what they've been doing for years. Only leads or Japan devs really have any say in any direction and don't listen to ideas from devs under them. So don't expect much creative input in most things. Some leads are verbally abusive. They've yelled at employees and don't see any consequences. The role structure is also a mess. Many devs with the senior title mainly earned their titles just be being there a long time and being friends with the lead. Nepotism is rampant. Japan can be a bottleneck in regards to decisions. Progress moves way slower than it should and often work is thrown out and redone (sometimes multiple times). There have been times where devs have had to work a full year on a single task. And sometimes, there will be a deadline that the team isn't ready for and then devs are asked to work over the weekend or during holidays. They don't do comp days so you will have to consider that time gone. No overtime pay here. Unless you're a lead, you won't have really any contact with the Japan-side. Meetings with Japan are very closed off, so most don't actually get to work with any of the Japan developers directly. They will likely claim that you get to work with Nintendo during interviews, but it really isn't true for most of the team. When they come to visit, only a select few would be invited to join them for dinner after work. Overall, it's not a great place despite being part of Nintendo.

Retro is a shadow of its former self. The company made terrible decisions after the Metroid Prime games. It used to have some of the best talent in the industry, and it still has a lot of good artists, but it lost almost all of its top-tier engineering and design talent after Metroid Prime 3 while bringing on a lot of people who never should have been hired. It didn't value its talent highly enough and now it's paying the price, and the management doesn't know how to rebuild a team half as good as what it used to have.