Big Fish Games reviews

Last fall, 15% of the company was laid off so the new president could restructure. Upper level executives were brought in that had all previously worked with the new president in the past, some of whom had little experience in mobile game development. In the last year, the environment in our office has become extremely toxic and fear based and no longer cares about the people in the company. Our leadership doesn’t have a strong strategy to create hit games and it extremely evident from all his actions that Jeff Karp does not care about his employees.

Management & Culture: - QA and CS departments are often flat-out ignored. - Heavy sense of classism - executives / management are completely out of touch with employees, and teams look down on others often. - Management is terrible at laying off unskilled employees, many people that actively bring the company and projects down remain for years with little to no punishment and no threat of termination. - CEO is awful. He blames business failures on employees not being motivated enough, even as they work huge amounts of overtime. - Quarterly reports are often dishonest or purposefully obscure - in private meetings numbers are reported to be critically poor, but then in big meetings in front of the whole company they are reported to be just fine. - When tough questions are posed to management, they often avoid giving answers or give an answer that employees want to hear only to do the opposite in the following months. - Executives and production teams don't care about players at all beyond using them as a means to make profit. Common player complains go ignored for months, if not years, and are only addressed when they reach a critical point that breaks the game in a major and unavoidable way. - Management, production, HR, and many other "higher-level" teams often come in late to work and leave early, rarely working 8 hour days with no punishment, and take many work-from-home days per week with no warning or reasoning. "lower-level" teams such as QA and CS are heavily punished for doing similar, and are often denied requests to work from home even with advance notice and compelling reasoning. Business & Compensation: - Games produced are little more than clones chasing after popular trends. There is very little innovation, even compared to other mobile game companies. - Benefits have been getting progressively worse year after year. - Pay is not competitive compared to other companies in the field in the area. - QA and CS departments have both begun outsourcing work, and are being pressured to outsource further. Both departments are desperately trying to promote employees out of fear that they will be shut down.