Fusebox Games Reviews

In summary: most of the management and staff is either incompetent, indecisive or not listened to, which makes the development of current and new games nigh impossible and the atmosphere increasingly negative. The management is attempting to make things better, but so far they have not actively listening and communicating with their workforce, and don’t seem to care much about them since they arbitrarily lay-off competent and appreciated employees. - Indecisive and disorganised management, leading to slow or frozen project development, especially for new projects. - The staff is not listened to; upper management makes decisions without consulting their teams, even the leads. Leads are often as clueless as their teams, if not more, about what is happening in the company. - No creative direction/vision owner, no one seems to know what to do nor how to do it. - Huge tech debt, the Unity project of the live game is almost unusable. - Upper management does not understand how games are made, therefore can't provide the development teams with what they need. - Somewhat exploitative towards junior staff, hiring straight from uni without proper mentoring/management; they abuse from their lack of experience and expect them to do all the work without any manager properly helping them, and/or expect them to do multiple jobs at once. There's a fine line between encouraging graduate/junior hiring, and hiring graduates because they're cheap and won't speak up because they have no other experience. - Seniority is not always representative of the industry level, junior staff is sometimes being misled into thinking their skills and workflow are at industry level, because they get promoted without proper mentoring. - Repeatedly make empty promises for years on, keep the staff motivated by promising new game development but it never happens, go back on their words, say everything and their opposite whenever it suits them. - Mislead on hiring about what the role will be or can't always deliver on it; don't provide adequate support to get the job done or don’t give them the opportunity to do the work they were hired to do, don't understand game development workflows. - Poor communication across the different departments, there is no or very little aligment between the teams, teams often discover other teams have done work relevant to them long after the fact. - The teams are not treated equally, some are treated as better than the others (which leads to very different experiences of the company between teams). The upper management does not understand the real impact each team has in the making of a good game. - Sharing publicly feedback and questions with teammates and managers is reprehensible, many of the staff and managers can't take criticism; they say they want to improve that but they don’t put their money where their mouth is, the company communications are out of touch if not dishonest. - Used to pride themselves on inclusivity but removed it from their values, and the teams are forbidden from making the game stories as inclusive as they want to; there are concerns of homophobia/transphobia with the product direction despite a good part of the company being queer. There is also a history of sexual harassment from higher-up. - Office culture used to be good but company reorg led to a colder, impersonal communication with the staff. Live, honest communication is discouraged (even if they say they do want it). - HRs don’t have genuine talks with the staff, leading to a feeling of hypocrisy and disconnect between the company’s values and what the staff really wants.