Rocksteady Reviews

4.1

84% would recommend to a friend

(87 total reviews)

52% positive business outlook

Rocksteady has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 87 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Rocksteady employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Media and communication industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

87 reviews
2.0
9 Sept 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I came to Rocksteady for the promise of quality based on being a fan of the Arkham games. They spend a lot of energy on things like social mixers, little perks like food care packages, and working through issues like their lack of diversity and inclusivity. On this last point, this is definitely a focus for them on the typical games industry problems of lack of diversity in gender/sexual orientation/neurodiversity/etc. However as I discuss in detail in the cons below this same care is NOT reflected at all in how they run their project or manage people's work and efforts.

Cons

The company is exceedingly poor at recognizing and promoting talent. The company has terrible turnover as a result of bad morale because of how badly managed the project is. The design direction is chaotic, murky, obtuse and above all doesn't care about opinions from anyone outside of the "annointed few" who founded the studio or have been there a while and continue to spout off about their design philosophy without realizing the games industry has moved on in the 6+ years since the shipped a full product. It's like watching an indie developer learn GaaS and making every single mistake possible along the way. Lord help you if you relocate to the UK for this company, because they give you little to no support to ensure that process is positive or that you get a hand navigating the byzantine systems in this country. You'll feel completely alone the entire way, with nothing but meaningless encouraging platitudes from HR to help you in your struggle.

1.0
29 Aug 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

+ Industry standard salary (not competitive but not below the standard as well) + Very friendly and sharing colleagues — glad to meet them over there! + Social activities and charity efforts are very cool

Cons

- Old fashioned development pipeline which is hard to call it AAA in this day and age - Obsessive ship-it-fast mindset, P1 bugs & issues are the real tasks while features/content are not - Extreme emphasis on (fake) positivity so that you could side-track actual problems easily - Always hands-off attitude on tasks, you have to prove that it is their work to do - Zero commitments towards cultural and development-related problems except "talk to your lead/director individually and they'll follow-up with relevant parties" aka Backchannelling-as-a-Service - They are trying hard to give a professional, caring and "inclusive" studio outlook while in fact they are havily pushing people back and addressing issues by convincing you that they were not real problems in the first place.

1.0
16 Apr 2021

Avoid at All Costs

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* Great group of people to work with. * Tries to be very inclusive.

Cons

* Production has full control over decisions and will ignore engineering teams to do what they think is best, leading to many problems such as producers developing their own versions of tools engineers have created and forcing their use, teams being forced to do nothing but constant bug triage/fixing because all bugs are priority 0 must fix, and leads working 60+ hours a week doing data entry. * Questionable engineering practices. * Company uses Agile terminology but doesn't understand Agile methodology, instead following waterfall practices that significantly slow and hinder development. * Strong focus on time-tracking. Every hour of every week is mapped out the week before in a 15-30+ minute one-on-one planning session, and employees are expected to fill out how much time they worked on each task. * Overtime is not required, but the amount of work assigned to each person with the understanding that it must be finished for the product to be complete means people feel a strong need to work overtime just to keep up. * High-level decisions with high costs made without consulting the teams that will be impacted. * Far too many unnecessary meetings. * Unwilling to change, despite processes no longer working. "This has worked for us in the past, so we see no reason to change." * Draconian restrictions (very restrictive Internet policy, for instance) and encouragement of whistleblowing on fellow employees if they aren't following the rules. * Very cult-like yes-person atmosphere to the culture. People speaking up about problems are talked to one-on-one and told to get in line rather than making trouble. Management edicts are frequently showered in effusive praise. * Salary is comparably very low.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 87 Reviews

Glassdoor has 106 Rocksteady reviews submitted anonymously by Rocksteady employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Rocksteady is right for you.