Big Fish Games Reviews

Pros

Amasing team, facilities and location

Cons

Being only flash developer in the company i couldn't communicate the problems with someone else

Advice to Senior Management

Good organize, take more responsabilities on development team

Pros

good place easy to work at

Cons

none, low pay might be one

Advice to Senior Management

more money for associates

Pros

There are many great people to work with at Big Fish. I met some extremely talented, fun to be around, hard-working people. The company has been able to bring in really fantastic, talented staff. The location is amazing as well.

Cons

Unfortunately, most of the talent lies below the executive level and either burns out or is shown the door quickly. Salaries (outside of Engineering) are below industry standard. The ability to schmooze is prized above good work. As the company has grown, metrics are much more important than game-changing ideas. The company feels stagnant where it once was really exciting.

Advice to Senior Management

The company was once great. Get back to your roots by eliminating the management that is unable to inspire and start listening to your staff's ideas again. Realize that people who are best at parties aren't necessarily the best at growing your business.

Pros

Opportunity to wear multiple hats, get broad business & technical exposure. Flat organization, unbuereaucratic business processes.

Cons

Wrong people in wrong positions. Constantly re-inventing the wheel on best industry practices. Lack of respect of experienced and motivated employees. Startup culture has given way to corporate politics.

Advice to Senior Management

Less top-down micro-management, empower people, respect subject matter experts instead of forcing people to "collaborate" on team's lowest common denominator (weakest link in chain often defines teams' contributions)

Pros

It's a fun and relaxed place to work. They give you a fully stocked fridge like many startups, and try to make a relaxed atmosphere. You can even play video games in the break room. I met some great people there who are passionate about technology and games and were dedicated to what they were doing. There were some nice benefits like matching 401k, health insurance, and a free bus pass. It's a good company to learn about video games industry. The office is next to Puget Sound and there are some great views, especially at dusk. When I initially joined, the company had more of a startup vibe which was very empowering. If I didn't know how to do something, I simply learned how to do it and got things done. This environment seemed to change later on as the organization got bigger.

Cons

The fun factor of Big Fish Games is sometimes forced and coerced. There is a "shiny happy disneyland fascist" feel about the fun you have. For example, they stage these fun company parties which are juxtaposed by a nefarious, cruel, opaque, yet public way in which some employees were surreptitiously fired for no justifiable reason (at least none that my coworkers or I could surmise). I've never seen this type of behavior at any other company I've worked for and it created a culture of fear amongst me and my fellow coworkers which was counterproductive.

Ultimately I helped produce games that I was not proud of. I really love video games and it's something I'm extremely passionate about, but I felt that management and many people I was working with did not
necessarily have the same passion for video games I did; instead all they really wanted was money or a day job. At the end of my tenure, I left because I could not be honest with myself and feel a sense of pride about the games I was working on. I still feel like there's a lot of innovation in this market segment, but unfortunately a lot of my ideas were drowned out.

A previous reviewer on here stated that , if you want to be successful at Big Fish, be prepared to 'play the game'. I feel that this is sadly true. The leadership team does not want to be challenged by better ideas or better directions, and unfortunately it hurts your career to be overly critical. Many of the folks being promoted are ladder climbers that care little about video games or business strategy, and instead want to suck up to management for the benefit of their own careers. I felt like the company could be ten times better if the politics surrounding it didn't feel like a fraternity, and if more honesty was exchanged.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to all levels of the company. Good ideas sometimes bubble up from below. Ideas are fragile and if they get suffocated by middle management, then this will ultimately stifle your company. I feel like there was not enough transparency in the organization. There's quite a bit of bureaucracy in the company and you need to eliminate this dead weight, even if you are not in a financially bad position. Managers who are likable don't necessarily provide valuable contributions or honest advice for the company. At the end of the day you have a group of managers who are toadies and operate obsequiously. Having a management team of sycophants may feel good on a superficial level, but it doesn't really build true team of A players that will help your organization. As an example, I'm sure Reed Hastings of Netflix had too many of these folks in his company surrounding him, which ultimately led to the disastrous decisions they made in 2011 in regards to price increases and the splitting of their business. I feel like there is a contingent like this in your organization. Sniff them out and fire them.

Focus on your product more. You have too many bean counters and analytical types who know how to make profits, but don't have many artists, and taste-makers who know what makes a good game (people who love video games and have really good taste). It's one thing to be a video game programmer, and quite another to be an video game artist. Similarly to a previous reviewer's comments, I feel that a lot of senior level managers there don't play games and hope that other people in the organization will somehow make up for their lack of passion. If your A-players can't name their favorite games in the context of the history of video games in a critical way, there can't be any soul in your product. This can't be feigned and you can't rely on others to substitute a lack of passion. You need to make games that you'd like to play yourself in order to be successful. And the only way to know what a good game is, is to be honestly passionate about gaming. I felt that Faunasphere failed because no one in charge actually played it and could honestly critique it; the game was really terrible. At the end of the day, I just couldn't visualize the management team coming home from work, spending their free time playing Faunasphere, and honestly loving it.

You don't want to be selling shitty games in-between the good ones; it just devalues the brand. What you need is to make really high quality, innovative games. You just need a few of these and things can swing around in your favor. Social games is the trend now, so you need to somehow enter that market, even though there are many competitors. If you have a good concept for a new type of addicting game that's high quality, that can be your way to enter that market. Some social games that are played via smartphones would also be a great idea.

Pros

Working at Big Fish Games has been a great ride. If you are a self-starter, there are many opportunities for personal advancement.

The people who work for Big Fish are all kids at heart and it shows during the workday (and after hours!). I've enjoyed my time with every coworker I've ever had and have made some great friends over the years.

As a startup, Big Fish has shown tremendous strategic savvy while navigating the challenging digital gaming waters. Most of their best games are exclusive to Big Fish. The company has grown and continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Cons

There are two major challenges to working at Big Fish. Both are common among successful startups.

First, engineering resources are stretched to the limit. With so much tech competition in Seattle, Big Fish struggles to land new engineers. This makes it challenging to secure resources for projects not deemed critical. Even the simplest updates to the site can sometimes take weeks or even months.

Second, with a workforce of less than 500 (and many of them in Customer Support), there aren't a lot of opportunities for career advancement.

Lastly, if you want to be successful at Big Fish, be prepared to 'play the game' (no pun intended). It is critical that you buddy up to everyone at the Director level or above. Learn the humor (dark and cynical), hone your persona, and get people to like you. It's a very buddy-buddy working environment and you don't want to end up on the outside looking in.

Advice to Senior Management

Increase the overall level of transparency and get serious about properly implementing analytics, testing, and improving the new user experience.

Pros

- Open and collaborative
- Fun
- Constantly improving communication between groups
- Best of both worlds - creative and technical
- Fast paced, lots to build and develop
- Excellent products created by passionate professionals
- Getting better at celebrating accomplishments!

Cons

- Moves so fast at times, it's hard to keep up
- More leadership/management training could be put to good use

Pros

Lots of fun and smart people, senior management with vision and constantly adapting to the changing market, makes good games, takes care of employees with special needs, descent benefits, great office with ocean view.

Cons

A bit chaotic from time to time while trying to find focus, matrix management of projects make them difficult to complete on time and to the original vision, business to engineering ratio is high.

Advice to Senior Management

Simplify management, reduce number of stakeholders in projects, reduce the business layer and increase engineers.

Pros

beautiful, comfortable office. any office item you need (like special chairs for back support, even fitness balls to sit on, they will provide!). benefits are good - gym membership, gym in building, free bus passes, fun morale events, good insurance, etc. It's also a very energetic, fun, creative environment.

Cons

there seemed to be a lot of employee turn over while I was there. maybe that is not the case now.

Pros

It's a casual place to work without some of the formalities that other businesses have. Working in the video game business is fun, and casual games is a growing market. I learned a lot when the company was in hypergrowth mode and some of the strategies it was pursuing. Although the company is sizeable now, I learned a lot about startup culture, software development, and online based content delivery business when it was a smaller organization. There are a lot of smart and very talented people who work there who are very dedicated at what they do.

Cons

I think the HR department is severely lacking and hurts the rest of the company as a result. I don't think these people understand talent or have any idea on how to find new talent and maintain them. Part of it revolves around salary, and part of it revolves around not being able to execute well on their day to day tasks. They are providing opinions to management that are not insightful to the long term viability of the company. HR/Management likes to hire from the outside instead of within. Pay is also a lot less .than you can get elsewhere with the same skillset and experience. The company tries to use the fun factor to reel you in, without compensating you properly for your labor. Little do people know, that they can earn 30-35% more in the same position elsewhere. There is a lot of red tape at the business these days and it is very group think orientated which doesn't necessarily lead to good results. The bureaucracy also makes it difficult to get important decisions to be made effectively. Many key people in the management staff don't really play or understand video games or understand their place in the industry except for the founder. Although you can make large amounts of revenue with MBA's in office, their lack of understanding a quality product leads to compromised and diminishing quality of the titles they distribute as well a lack of vision for innovation in the long run. The CEO hasn't played a single video game for more than 5 minutes in his life

Advice to Senior Management

Lowest common denominator product and reducing the price floor on games not only diminishes the long term viability of the company but of the industry. More thought should be out into the long term vision and quality of your product and more innovative ways to distribute that product instead of finding cheap ways to get intellectual property and distributing mediocre games. Your HR department may seem like they know what they are talking about, but they can't smell talent if it were standing next to them. Having a bad hiring/HR firm will only hurt you in the long run.

Technology-wise, with mobile devices gaining traction, its only a matter of time before your distribution portal loses ground when mass adoption of smartphones and other Post-PC platforms take off, so you need to find new ways to acquire paying users to quality content. Your current business model not only diminishes your revenue, but consistently lowers the bar for electronic entertainment. People will pay for a unique, quality experience. Although your inhouse development is good, you water those experiences down with third rate products. If my comments are taken with a grain of salt, consider Zynga which was founded in 2007, 5 years after Big Fish Games and is at least ten times as big and successful because they had a clear vision of what technological trends were happening and capitalized it. New ideas like social games via mobile platforms and interactivity will be needed in order to maintain the status quo and grow the business...

Also, you have research staff trying to figure out what products your customers want. Maybe if management actually played some games, they would be able to figureand predict what they wanted... This isn't rocket science here...