Sony Online Entertainment Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Good Benefits
Great Networking Opportunities

Cons – Incompetent Management
Creatively Stifling Atmosphere
Laughable Development Cycles
Terrible Games

Why this company still operates to this day baffles me. SOE was founded on what could honestly be called a fluke. Everquest debuted in 1999 as one of the first 3D MMOs and it gained popularity for being innovative, and one of a kind. Even though it was deeply flawed, lacked any kind of artistic style, or substance it still garnered a massive following and made everyone at SOE insanely rich. I heard stories of employees receiving bonus checks and then returning from lunch in extravagant sports cars. The problem is all the original management operate on the belief that one day SOE will return to those glory days and it's painfully apparent that mentality dictates how every game has been developed since then.

SOE games are not developed to be fun, creative, or rewarding experiences for the player. They are made to drain as much money from them as possible. The diction and vocabulary that dominates meetings is all about sales figures, user retention, exploring new ways to exploit the user, and destroying the competition. They motivate you with the promise of bloated bonuses, royalty checks (which I have never seen in my 5 years), raises, all with the successful launch of a new game. You simply can't motivate creative people in this way. We didn't go into games to make us rich, we did it because there we have an inherent passion to use this amazing medium to develop games that will inspire, enrich, and entertain the player. If you make games with the sole purpose to become rich, you'll neither become rich, or make great games. I believe it's this simple fundamental flaw in SOE's leadership that continues to ruin any potential to make great games.

Another problem are the ways the games are developed. For whatever reason SOE feels the need to re-invent the wheel each and every time never retaining the invaluable lessons learned from prior failures. Because of this games are never developed correctly. I've never seen a game go through a proper pre-production phase, a prototype stage, and once the game reaches a beta level it's never fully tested. It's rushed out the door and launched in a broken, bug ridden state that continually hurt SOE's reputation.

SOE hemorrhages talent. One positive thing about SOE is they hire a lot of artists out of school, and it's a great opportunity for them to gain experience, ship a title or two, and move on. This is unfortunate because I've seen a lot of very talented, passionate people come and go and if SOE could retain more of that talent the environment and quality of the games would improve. The people who remain at SOE have been there a very long time and have grown complacent with receiving their paycheck, releasing sub-par games, and are completely unmotivated to do much else. There are quite a few cliques and it can feel a bit like high school at times which is detrimental to the functionality of a team. The big problem here is that a lot of the management has been home grown, people who worked themselves up from QA, fixing and finding bugs, to managerial positions with responsibilities so beyond their skill set and experience level it baffles the mind. SOE also promotes members of QA to the design team. You have to admire the motivation of someone who worked at Burger King, got a job doing Quality Assurance at SOE, then became a designer. It's a romantic idea, but the fact is these people have absolutely no experience designing games, and when all their knowledge of design comes from poorly designed games, well, you can see there is an obvious problem here.

When I quit SOE Smedley had just implemented a mandatory arrangement where every person on the team had to dedicate work time to taking phone calls as a customer service representative. Yes, I am not joking. SOE had laid off a large part of the work force in 2012, closed a number of studios, and as a result artists, programmers, designers, and everyone else had to take customer service training to answer phone calls and troubleshoot customer problems. I don't know if that is still in effect, but just the fact they decided to do this meant it was time to go.

Advice to Senior Management – Gut the management. Find some new blood with a relevant, up to date understanding of the industry and restructure. You're no longer qualified to make decisions at that level and every time you do you're making things monumentally worse. Stop hiring temps, outsourcing, people from QA and properly invest in top tier talent. Finally, listen. Trust the people you bring in from the outside. They have great ideas, and are being paid to share the invaluable experience they've had working for other more successful developers.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Decent pay and good benefits.

Cons – Terrible management and lots of backstabbing between employees. Inexperienced studio management making very poor development decisions and blaming failure on lower employees. Terrible understanding of scheduling and process. Hostile attitudes toward employees wanting to transfer from one SOE office to another.

Advice to Senior Management – Honestly, I think the place is so broken they need to be shut down and Sony needs to start over.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment as a contractor for more than 3 years

Pros – (most of the time) fun atmosphere
Passionate people at the lower levels

Cons – Broken people at the middle levels

Incompetence galore at the top - too many times they have displayed their lack of trust in the people they have hired.

Too many people promoted by "sucking up" socially.
Too many people promoted by "sucking up" physically.

Don't worry; they won't fire you. They will just create a position for you to sit in till they have their next yearly layoff (maybe this is a pro?)

Nonsensically abusive; if you work here, be prepared for the mentality of "the beatings will continue until morale improves" and you'll be reminded that everyone on Earth would easily step in at your pay grade.

Overtime is also optional; so is working at Sony.

Upper and middle have hired/promoted too many friends; about every 2-3 years all the talent runs away and the good ol boys stay

Advice to Senior Management – Stay off twitter, stay away from dev and stop listening to marketing all the time.

Manage your people and let your people do the work.
Don't step in with your "brilliant idea that must be implemented!".
Don't revamp game systems a month before launch...

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Sony Online Entertainment full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Some of the people are nice. Not too much overtime. Decent bonuses.

Cons – No career advancement or salary raises unless you are part of the in-crowd. Very cliquey, high school environment. Stale, irrelevant products. Low salaries. Absolutely no future to move up or work on anything different/more challenging.

Advice to Senior Management – Why do you think so many employees are jumping ship?? get it together, people. Management is constantly changing and company policies seem to change depending on who is in charge that week.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – I just cant remember any. They do have a better work/life balance than Amazon.

Cons – SOE has been a leader in an increasing problem we see in digital industries. The willingness on the part of the company to ignore the title and job position you were hired for. You may negotiate for a salary based on a job position, such as Character Animator, only to find yourself being asked to do the job of a Flash UI Designer.

Advice to Senior Management – Wake up and fire yourselves.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment

Pros – You can bring your dog to work

Cons – - Company is cliquish, its hard for new employees to assimilate and gain acceptance
- Managers micro manage everything
- The departments don't work well together, there are very limited resources and instead of using creatively the departments fight over what should be done

Advice to Senior Management – Work on creating and fostering a culture that focuses on doing what's right for the business and seeing it succeed vs. the status of quo each department looking out just for themselves. The company needs some major shaking up to be relevant, and the current way of how things get done isn't working

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment

Pros – The pay was great, licenses were fun and line-level employees were senior and skilled

Cons – Executive management is the same crusty old team that has been there since Sony bought the company. They are out of touch with current development techniques and business models. They purposefully mislead their teams about ship dates and demand crunch for, literally, years at a time to ship product. It is not a financially healthy part of Sony and suffers from the fear and reactionary behavior that come from that fact.

Advice to Senior Management – Do a better job of embracing console development and current MMO business models (Free-to-play). Be honest with your teams about crunch and ship dates. Update executive management with someone who has some exposure to modern game development.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment

Pros – Decent benefits package.
Casual dress code, shorts and tee shirts are allowed.
The lower level workers are some of the best in the industry.

Cons – Not only do they never let people take vacations, they will often make them work holidays and weekends as well.
12 hour work days are the norm.
Management simply does not know how to manage people other then through threats and intimidation.
Pay is very low for the industry, especially for such a large company.
Project managers are not trained for, or allowed to, manage projects.

Advice to Senior Management – Quit. I did not meet one person in management above the level of project manager who was competent at their job. The only hope for this company is for everyone from the studio heads to the CEO himself to leave and make room for people who have a chance to turn the company around.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sony Online Entertainment

Pros – Environment is very friendly on a day to day basis, and alot of the coworkers are really nice usually. Depending on the supervisor, its usually a pretty laid back place.

Cons – To get any kind of recognition in terms of getting hired on, or promoted in any way, they really only stick to people who are buds with development or themselves. For example, one person had been working at Sony for more than a year, and I know they had atleast 100% quality on every performance check. Yet a guy that worked there for less than two months got promoted to a GM lead before him, just because he was good friends with an Everquest II dev.

The management overall in the customer service department is very childish and its very reminiscent of high school cliques, even though most of the managers are in their 40s. Most every person I talked to in my time there were very disgruntled but only stayed because the environment is so bad at the moment.

Advice to Senior Management – Focus on skill to promote and not how good a person looks, or how good of a buddy they are. You don't realize, or don't care, how low of a morale the company has with how things are ran.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Sony Online Entertainment

Pros – Great if you want to get some experience in the MMO space.
SOE operates a number of MMO's so if you are looking to get into Platform or IT this might be a good place to look.

Cons – Nepotism and apathy are rampant at the highest levels.
There are a handful of talented and passionate people still there that want to see SOE come back from the depths of despair, and are actively trying to do what they can. Then you have the people that are merely collecting a paycheck, who have won favor from Smedley (or friends of Smedley) and are content to just sit on the sidelines. It is this dichotomy that is the most troublesome. Bottom line, if you are talented and passionate about making good games, this place probably isn't for you. The hard work of the few, is weighed down by the apathy and ineptitude of the many. Including and most importantly the people at the top of this organization.

Advice to Senior Management – Chief executives, VP's, and most of the directors need to leave. SCE needs to come in and install new leadership and focus the organization in a big way. SOE is too big, too fat, and too spread out to ever have a chance of being effective.
Austin needs to be the new SOE HQ where there is a much larger talent pool, as opposed to San Diego.
Shut down the San Diego office and move only a select few to Austin.
- Everquest: Sorry kiddo's, it's time to move on.
- Everquest 2: Troublesome, it's gotten so much better over the years but at the same time it takes a good sized team to keep it going. Not sure what to recommend here.
- Vangard: Just put it out of it's misery already.
- Free Realms: move it to Austin
Shut down Seattle and move The Agency and maybe a few key people to Austin.
Shut down Denver and Tuscon, again bring a few key people to Austin. Take their tech and IP and bring it all under one roof. You get the idea, get lean, get focused, and get profitable.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend