Future prospects only for non game-devs - Anonymous employee Jagex Employee Review

-I have no faith in the upper management. Most do not have a shred of game knowledge, and it seems that they look at the studio purely from a financial standpoint. Creativity and innovation comes way below profits, DAU, and various other business-speak abbreviations. This is all drummed into the heads of devs which crushes creative spirit -Career progression is a no-go. That is, unless you can somehow get into a managerial position that doesn't deal directly with game development. There are dozens of positions that seem to have been created solely for middle management to progress in some form. Meanwhile there are developers who have been there for years who have failed to get promoted in any way because they haven't met some arbitary unmentioned criteria. -The technology used is incredibly antiquated and stifles creativity. And most importantly, it kills career progression as skills are effectively useless outside the company. Although there have been some movement to update things, it has come years too late, so every update for tools or engine comes with a huge caviat. There's not a strong enough interest to update this technology properly as it will eat too much into profits for investors. -Pay is low, which does not help as employees live in and around Cambridge, a hugely expensive city with declining public transport. The pay rise pool is often much lower that anticipated and is spread so thinly around teams. Considering there's such talk about profits, that money is rarely ever seen. However a lot of the money for pay always seems to go on stupidly extravagant things such as luxury hotels for a night in London or gin and beer. This might seem great, but most people would rather have the money to pay their rent than to go to a hotel for a night. -New products are the worst aspect of the company. It relies so much on RuneScape, the sole breadwinner, as there hasn't been a single successful game beyond that. There have been hugely expensive mistakes, which has cost the company; not just financially. There is far too much apprehension to do anything new, unless it has a RuneScape theme (apparently the branding and strategy teams thinks that RuneScape is more popular than it is, and this is the only way to get anything considered) and even still, any sort of innovation is mulled over for at least a year until it loses its unique selling points as other games flood the market. -When games don't succeed, it is the blame of the developers. The games in question get dealt with in various awful ways, be it getting pulled in a humiliating fashion, or just met with radio silence, much to the frustration of players and affecting the reputation of the company and game alike. One big problem is that these games always need to be huge multiplayer 'services' with long tails in order to rake in huge amounts of cash. However this ultimately means the targets are never met, and the game can never be just completed and put out as they don't function without regular updates. It's one thing that is consistent with games Jagex creates, and something that doesn't look set to change -Even though a lot have now left, there are a few obnoxious 'untouchables' which are only there because it is practically impossible to rehire for that position. They can often threaten to leave, get paid a ton more to stay (which will no doubt have a knock-on effect to others who will miss out on decent pay rises), and continue being awkward to deal with on a personal and professional level. -Morale is so low, it's laughable. It's been acknowledged thanks to surveys but very little is actually done about it beyond superficial changes such as a new coffee machine