King Reviews

I arrived at King with 16 years experience but got treated like a junior. Overruled and belittled by a team that saw my criticism of how we run things as a reason to take me down, not as desire to improve things. The company operates like a weak facsimile of a FAMGA company (where I now work). It was horrible to observe the insidious culture of bullying and embarrassing to see the managers playing politics against each other. One of their values is ‘fun and friendly’. That simply isn’t true. And the pedantic interpretation of agile is absolutely insane.

TLDR: aggressive non compete clause, lack of creative freedom, big and slow corporation, boring tasks, obsolete tech, small career advancement opportunities. - 3 month notice period + 3 month non-compete period is not used to protect the company. Instead it's aggresively used to bully people who is quitting and scare people who is thinking to quit. Non-compete is even applied, if you go outside of mobile game industry. This is especially damaging, because not all companies will wait 6 month to hire you. - Work on personal projects is disallowed. Even non commercially for self education purpose. And you have to ask special permission to participate in game jams. - ‎Not much career advancement opportunities inside of Berlin studio. - Company is being run by salesmen, who have no idea of how to manage creative people. - ‎Don't believe the promotional materials on the web. Don't fool yourself, King is a big corporation with corresponding negative traits. - ‎Company management goes not follow the company values it has defined. - Everything in the company happens extremely slow. And numerous middle managers makes it even worse. - ‎Decision making happens painfully slow, partially because it happens in Stockholm, not locally in Berlin. - ‎Incompetent people in managerial positions are being kept because they are close to the studio management. It hurts the teams, but nobody says anything because they are nice guys. - ‎Lack of creative freedom. Most of the time you will spend cloning features from other titles, because business analysts said so. - Business analysts have much more impact on game design than actual game designers. - ‎Work here is not about creating great experience for the players, instead it's about squeezing more money from them. - Lots of promises to improve upon negative points, but almost no action Technology - Obsolete game engine and legacy code slow down feature development. - ‎Engine team is unable to deliver quality tools. - It's really hard to push tasks to decrease the technical debt. - ‎Adoption of modern tools and techniques is happening is extremely slow rate. - Lack of technical direction. Studio actually hired a Scrum master for the role of Technical Director. - Most of work is simple UI changes, or cloning features from other internal titles. So very little learning opportunities.