Bossa Studios Reviews

The management is beyond terrible. Narcissistic and self-obsessed with their own ideas, they are completely out of touch with the industry and their place within it. Despite having created and incredible creative team, they seem determined not to trust them to do their own jobs, and have even deliberately sunk projects for abritrary reasons (or through their own ego), whilst at the same time letting budget-draining, ego fueled zombie projects cripple the company for years at a time. There were many times I would see people working late, crying at their desks or stressed beyond reason at the behaviour and expectations of management, and the trickle down effects of their incompetence. From what I know from friends that still work there, this is still something of a problem. They are also completely clueless about how to properly market a game, relying on "viral success" and tricking influencers into doing all their marketing for them, for free, instead of paying for a properly planned marketing campaign. To be clear, this is not the fault of the marketing team themselves, but rather the upper management who are deluded into thinking they can be viral successes every single time they release a game and never spend a penny on actual marketing - unless that marketing is some ego stroking release party. This results in completely ridiculous and out of touch sales targets, based on a completely unrealistic view of the companies popularity. And when those out of touch targets aren't met, they don't blame themselves, they blame customers, or the development team instead. If that wasn't bad enough, theres also absolutely no way to leave genuine critical feedback and have them actually take it on board. The management team makes decisions in a closed room, and then leaves the dev teams to deal with the fallout of those decisions. They aren't consulted, they have no way to genuinely give input into projects - they must do what the management team thinks is best, whether or not that's based in reality or actual market understanding.

QA are grossly mistreated. Forced to work obscene crunch with no compensation. They are often dropped before owners realise that the roles are needed and new QA are hired again. This happens repeatedly. It's a real mess. Founders are habitually controlling and with no returns. The successful games the studio have made were made in spite of the founders, not because of them. In fact the founders attempted to shut those projects down. Instead the founders waste huge amounts of money on vanity projects that go nowhere and end in hardworking employees losing their jobs. If you are a designer, you will work alone. If you are a producer, you will have no support. Coders will be given unreasonable tasks without realistic timelines. Founders will often derail entire projects. And they will communicate in incredibly toxic and insulting ways. This recently resulted in the entire leadership team of a project resigning. More people intend to leave after lockdown or are actively looking for new opportunities. The studio is in free fall.