Big Fish Games Reviews

Pros

There's a renewed energy and focus at Big Fish, genuinely believe there are good (if not great) times ahead. Strong and motivated leadership and a supportive parent company. Spectacular new office space (2018), in an awesome downtown location.

Cons

It is a hit driven business, need to be tenacious and at the same time patient.

Pros

New Seattle office is fantastic and located downtown

Cons

Executives are out of touch with employees and customers

Pros

Interesting work if you like video games, excellent work life balance, friendly coworkers, good location downtown, internal promotions

Cons

Pay is well below industry standards, deceitful (lying) managers, cronyism, Dishonest HR

Pros

Big Fish supports career growth for their employees. I started as a Sr. Motion Graphics Artist and wanted to move into Project Management. I was recently promoted to Project Manager, Mgr. It's a challenging and fun new role for me. BFG encourages and welcomes people that take risk, challenge theirselves, and push the boundaries.

Cons

Need to communicate between teams throughout the company more effectively.

Pros

- Flexible hours, can occasionally work from home depending on team - OT, while heavily encouraged, is not mandatory - Possibility to move from QA / CS into "better" positions - Camaraderie within individual teams (and only within that team) - You can skate by without giving anything more than minimum effort (and often less!) without ever being punished

Cons

Management & Culture: - QA and CS departments are often flat-out ignored. - Heavy sense of classism - executives / management are completely out of touch with employees, and teams look down on others often. - Management is terrible at laying off unskilled employees, many people that actively bring the company and projects down remain for years with little to no punishment and no threat of termination. - CEO is awful. He blames business failures on employees not being motivated enough, even as they work huge amounts of overtime. - Quarterly reports are often dishonest or purposefully obscure - in private meetings numbers are reported to be critically poor, but then in big meetings in front of the whole company they are reported to be just fine. - When tough questions are posed to management, they often avoid giving answers or give an answer that employees want to hear only to do the opposite in the following months. - Executives and production teams don't care about players at all beyond using them as a means to make profit. Common player complains go ignored for months, if not years, and are only addressed when they reach a critical point that breaks the game in a major and unavoidable way. - Management, production, HR, and many other "higher-level" teams often come in late to work and leave early, rarely working 8 hour days with no punishment, and take many work-from-home days per week with no warning or reasoning. "lower-level" teams such as QA and CS are heavily punished for doing similar, and are often denied requests to work from home even with advance notice and compelling reasoning. Business & Compensation: - Games produced are little more than clones chasing after popular trends. There is very little innovation, even compared to other mobile game companies. - Benefits have been getting progressively worse year after year. - Pay is not competitive compared to other companies in the field in the area. - QA and CS departments have both begun outsourcing work, and are being pressured to outsource further. Both departments are desperately trying to promote employees out of fear that they will be shut down.