A tech company masquerading as a game company. Leadership is unqualified and makes weird decisions.
Pros
Depending on your role (ie: not an engineer) and what project you are on, the workload is NOT heavy and you get a lot of downtime. Benefits are pretty good, but not great.
Cons
Completely unqualified and inept leadership. They are running the company like a tech company, but trying to hire game developers to make games. The company keeps acquiring a bunch of tech start ups to shove more tech into our games instead of making our games fun. Which is why every single one of our games fail except for Pokemon Go. The hierarchy makes no sense (Art and Design are considered the same thing because its "not Engineering"), the career ladders make no sense (Execs have to approve all promotion requests which mean people who doesn't know you or what you do gets to decide your future), and they are forcing everyone back into the office. There was already huge turnover in the year 2021 due to backlash from forcing people back to office. The execs have said in an all-hands meeting that they only want people who want to be at Niantic to work at Niantic, and if we don't want to return to office then we can find another job. You are also paid on the lower end of market rate. Also, depending on the team and role, there is crunch. I don't know any other mobile gaming studio that makes their team crunch for months. It's pretty shocking. Leadership keeps comparing themselves to Google. Google is making people return so they do too. Well, Google isn't a game studio and almost all game studios are letting people work remotely. Niantic is also not paying Google levels of salary either.