Dying company with atrocious management botches release after release by making the same mistakes again and again
Pros
- Coworkers are passionate about game development and very nice - They don't crunch as insanely as some other game companies - The benefits are good
Cons
- Trend-chasing games are announced long before they are ready and then rushed out the door to meet an unreasonable deadline which only got set because the game was announced too early. - Production pipeline is fundamentally broken and despite years of complaints producers make no effort to adjust anything. Assignments that rely on other work being done will have the same due date as that other work that needs to be done. Every single team is constantly behind schedule as a result. - EXTREME emphasis on quantity over quality. Since everyone is always playing catch up due to the broken production pipeline, there is no time to properly polish or test things anyway. - There is zero effort put into creating fundamental systems at the start of a game's development because of the focus on quantity. The higher ups don't care if everything is broken, buggy, looks bad, and sounds bad, as long as we make a lot of cosmetics and characters so we can say we have a lot of content in the game. - CEO and Executive producer live in their own world and are extreme negative forces on the games that force their bad ideas onto teams that know better but do not have the power to protest. - Business and marketing sides of Hi-Rez consistently fumble promotional deals with major companies, totally botch a game's release, and then quickly abandon it when it's not an instant hit. - Teams do not have ownership of their actual area of expertise. Everything is decided by the CEO and executive producer, who only listen to twitch streamers. - CEO and Exec. Producer will completely pivot a game's direction and throw out 6 months of work on a whim. There will be no attempt to look for a reasonable solution to salvage some work, just throw it all out and instant pivot because higher ups said so. - The hyper-political boys club that are the higher ups only look out for themselves and genuinely have no vision for anything. They are not leaders. They are followers who have no faith in themselves or their employees.