Ubisoft Reviews in Shanghai, China Area

Pros

They're an international company with English speaking offices in multiple countries. There are opportunities to move internationally and see the world. You also will get a lot of insight into the French philosophy of game design and how they manage their studios.

Cons

French management is extremely political. Be prepared to grit your teeth and bare a lot of ridiculous decision making without any regard for the human element. Human resources literally treats human beings like resources at Ubisoft Shanghai. This may be peculiar to Shanghai, but if you have anything that falls out of the normal operating procedures, they will not be flexible and help you out. It's a very corporate environment and at the end of the day you are just a resource that they move around to make things look good on paper.

The French design philosophy is also not conducive to getting games done. You will spend hours arguing minor theoretical applications of things from other games that the "editorial" team has played. These will not help you make your game at all. They are so enamored with theory that actual work rarely gets done. That's why you will see annoying things in most of their games like collecting flags in Assassin's Creed. They were addressing some theoretical concern of game design and missing the whole point of game design. Making fun games.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn to actually listen to what your employees are telling you. If they aren't happy, your games will suffer. Happy people make better games (it's just a fact). Also, if you want to cut some dead weight, get rid of your entire editorial team. They are a complete waste of everyone's time and they slow down development to a crawl and because their mandates must be addressed, it often causes your game design teams to add really stupid stuff to your games. If you want your games to be as fun as Call of Duty 4, you need to design in a similar manner to Call of Duty 4, and I promise you they did not have charts and graphs with gameplay "levers" on them.