Jam City Reviews

-The salary is not competitive and they base what you're paid on where you live. So if you live outside California you've got a good chance at being paid even less. -The benefits are minimal and the healthcare package even more so. -They sell you on the 'Unlimited Paid Time Off' scheme, when it's actually given at your manager's behest and gets rid of those pesky 'Gov mandated time off' regulations. So basically you don't get PTO unless your managers let's you and you have no rights to cash out any PTO you didn't use. It's just a way to get around gov regulated PTO in a way that benefits the company at the employee's expense. -Under Chris Dewolfe and Josh Yguado's executive leadership they dumped way too much studio money chasing the NFT/Blockchain bandwagon, despite the desperate warnings from their employees about its volatility. And when it went bust, like most with their heads firmly removed from their backsides knew it would, they laid off 17% of the entire studio. Their bloated salaries are made off the backs of developers' overtime, sleepless nights, health, and missed time with friends and family. It's always the employees who are expected to pay for their undeserved bonuses, and it's the employees who are expected to be thrown out on to the streets for their predictable failures.

The company overall is risk adverse. Everything needs to be tested and proven to make money before waves are made. I understand that is the industry norm now, but don't come here expecting that you will be able to pour your passion into the projects here. Each studio is different and all managed differently. I heard great things about the other studios, but LA studio’s management is hot garbage. The company is risk-adverse, but Management wants to make waves to look good. They'll just make all the decisions on their own; it is not a collaborative atmosphere. Because they are making all the decisions on their own, they usually make very late decisions. You will get top-down orders from management and will be expected to deliver quality results in a short amount of time. Most of these decisions are to just copy whatever our competitors are doing for guaranteed results. You end up feeling really burnt out making all this work, which is just copying others, only to see things get get shelved because they didn't test well enough. The studio does not believe in promoting from within. They give you title bumps and small raises to keep you working at the studio, but it takes about 3-4 years for that to happen. If you get promoted, you don't get an increase in responsibilities, have any weight to make decisions, or learn anything new. Sometimes, they don't even bother and they will just hire their friend to work on top of you. Nothing actually changes. Everything is still top-down from Management, regardless of your title. Because of this, people feel highly disrespected and titles no longer mean anything at this studio. Corporate recently (in 2020) started annual reviews and raises. However, there is a percentage cap on how much your raise can be. Studio Management underpays in general, so no matter how much your percentage raise will be, you will always be underpaid compared to industry standards. Sometimes, Management makes bad decisions which costs the team a lot of time, effort, and money...but they are never held accountable. There is a disconnect from the studio with the rest of the company and Management is supposed to be the bridge. However, it sometimes seems that Management uses that as an opportunity to not be truthful about how things are run at the studio. Because of that, there has been some layoffs in the past 2 years at the studio. Unfortunately, the ongoing sentiment of the studio is that the people who were let go were targeted. This causes a lot of people to be afraid of coming out to HR or Upper Management about the issues they face at the studio. People feel that it is easier to just leave the company, rather than speaking out and potentially causing trouble for others on the team. High turnover at this studio. There is also an ongoing sentiment that Management is not qualified for their positions. Almost all of them were hired because they are friends with higher ups in Corporate. They do not seem to understand how to communicate or work with others. That's fine if they want to be a designer/engineer/artist/PM and just focus on the projects, but if they are part of Management they should be able to manage people. There is a big lack of communication, coupled with them basically not caring, that causes Management to be "unaware" of the unhappiness of employees at this studio. They don't seem to believe in keeping good talent. It seems that people who say "yes" with their decisions are more important.