Long hours and little reward or recognition for work provided.
Pros
The surroundings are nice and the weather is good. You are close to wine country, surfing, and easy access to the Golden Gate bridge and all that SF has to offer. Living and working in Novato is cheaper than living in SF, tho the SF Bay area in general is still pretty pricey. Working on new hardware for each new console cycle was fun. Working on a high-profile AAA title was cool.
Cons
The company is very cliquey, and advancement in the company really depends more on who you know and less on what you do. I don't think there are huge opportunities for advancement. Visual Concepts / 2K Games really only does work on a few products at the Novato location, their NBA game and their WWE game (they also oversaw NBAMMO for China, and MLBMMO for Korea). If sports games are not your thing, you probably won't enjoy your time with the company. I worked at Visual Concepts/2K for many years. My early time there was when the company was much smaller, and I felt that the management did a better job of rewarding the employees for the work they produced. I didn't feel that the company paid a competitive wage for the experience the employee had or workload that was expected. Remember, these games come out on a yearly cycle, which means that there was a heavy crunch mode every year. If you had worked on more than one of their sports titles, you'd find yourself rolling from one crunch mode into the next without any break. They don't seem to value life outside work, and the turnover rate is high. The burnout rate is also very high. Maybe spending 6-7 days a week doing work would be OK if I was just a typical geek starting out, but as I grew older I began to hate the work/life imbalance. The salary did not make up for this since employees were salaried and generally didn't get overtime. You were expected to put time in on weekends (free) because you loved the product. The benefits seemed OK (I never had to use the healthcare benefits that much, so I can't say how comprehensive they were in comparison to other companies). The time-off policies are not adhered to, especially when there were milestones that needed to be reached. I was told to write down that I took time off when I hadn't, and then use "comp" time after the deadlines. This was said with a nudge-wink. We did not have Comp time.
