Fortis Games reviews

You will notice that there are a cluster of reviews at 4-5 stars and a cluster of reviews at 1-2 stars. There are themes present across the 1-2 star reviews. I will discount the 4-5 star reviews as they are either written by people who have drank the kool aid or written by HR types to get the star count higher. The company claims to be like a startup, but it is ~400 people, owned wholly by Sands Casino of ~55000 people. It is not a startup, it is just a smaller enterprise company that wants to be a larger enterprise company with all of the bureaucracy and politics that involves. Fully 1/3 of the current employees are "managers" or other high titled people without work contribution. It has acquired a bunch of former failing game studios that continue to not ship games. It has augmented the bought game studios with nepotism hires. The referral bonus is so high that people compete to get their friends hired. Nobody knows how deep the Sands money bucket is, but I would expect them to really start paying attention to the money spent versus payback at some point very soon. The leadership is absolute rubbish as others have pointed out in glassdoor. It is full of nepotism and politics. They cannot make decisions and do not follow the fortis values. They claim victory internally of a shipping product when a simple mvp has been created. The technical leadership have little technical knowledge and are easily fooled into believing greatness has been achieved. The leadership is pretty much all USA based and the other countries represented in the company are at the mercy of a far away leadership whims. You willed not be valued as an employee, you are just head count that exists to bolster some VP's master plan of creating a larger empire for themselves. Shipping great product with outstanding user experience is not important. Spending your days in meetings is the goal of leadership and that extends down the worker bees. If your idea of working is to come and hang out with your friends, welcome aboard. If you want to make a difference and you are an A player, look elsewhere.

Lack of structure on a lot of levels. This is a big one, and even though it comes with the territory of Fortis being a startup, it feels especially bad at Fortis because of how quickly the company has grown since 2022. Processes for how we work change all the time, in the name of improvement. Uncertain paths for career growth, which continues to be a WIP. You basically have to take responsibility for yourself, which is not a bad thing to learn/exercise but can be frustrating. Pretty big variance on employee experience (pay, management, work/life balance) depending on the team you're on. Central and support teams are well structured; game teams historically tend to be under more pressure and experience greater uncertainty.