I love what I do (most days) but I wish I could support my family.
Pros
Everyone says this, but the people who you work with here are amazing. It's a casual environment with a lot of laughs. I love playing games over lunch with my coworkers. I also love meeting gamers from all over the country at conventions like GenCon. Discounts are amazing: huge discounts on our own games, but we're also able to get discounts on games from other companies!
Cons
I will admit that things have gotten a bit better with management allowing more autonomy in the departments. However, the CEO still inserts himself into the process regularly. He also still flies off the handle on employees, loudly insults our work, and turns what should be an amazing job into an exercise into how much abuse someone can handle for under 30K a year. Management knows enough to keep the company puttering away, but not enough to become a game-changer like Wizards of the Coast. People that are in those management positions have no qualifications to be there, they've just been friends with the CEO for a long enough time. The company does no research on what customers want or trends in the business. We're just forced to throw out as many products as possible as fast as possible and hope that a few of them stick. Management also has no education or training and very little understanding of how to work efficiently. For example, they have most of the staff pack up Thanksgiving sale orders for a week or more in November. So they're paying 50 people their full salary to stop their professional work and pack boxes in a freezing warehouse for a week. Management doesn't realize that they are bleeding money when they do this, but instead thinks that they're saving money by not hiring temps. Oh, and we're still screamed at when our games are delayed by this warehouse duty. So we have to work even longer hours during those times so we can pack orders and design, test, and proof our games. Customers wonder why we have so many problems with our rule books. The reason for this is that we have only a few weeks to churn out products, and we have to play test on our own time. We actually can't play test our games during work hours. So we put in a 40+ hour work week trying to put out as many SKUs as possible, then have to work late into the evenings and over the weekend to play test the game. I love everything about board games, but it's hard to spend 60+ hours a week at work away from my family, especially when I'm earning such a small salary (a clever move by the CEO so he doesn't have to pay for the over-time he forces us to do every week). Despite all the profit we make, employees are paid very poorly. Home ownership is very rare here. Employees who are salaried don't share in the profits of their game design. So if your game sells 5 copies or 5 million copies, you're only going to make your 30,000 dollars a year salary. Independent contractors and freelancers can negotiate for a portion of net sales (like royalties) over the life of the game, just not employees. This is why many of our best designers quit and become freelancers.