BioWare Reviews

Pros

The pay and benefits were good.

Cons

Most disorganized art department I've ever worked for. Incredibly stressful and cut-throat work environment.

Pros

* Passionate, smart developers who truly care about the products they're making. This sounds trite, but it's true. * EA really isn't as bad as many people think. * The studio is attempting to be really innovative with its current and next planned projects. This is a always a double-edged sword. Let's hope it works out for our fans' sake. * Salaries and benefits are decent. Some specializations could certainly make more money by moving outside the games industry, but overall you probably won't feel like you're being cheated.

Cons

* Front-line management is often unfairly expected to do the jobs of two people. They must simultaneously act as advanced individual contributors and as people managers. This leads to frequent burnout by the company's brightest. * Double standards. Upper management does not practice what they preach. Cronyism. This is clearly evident during promotion and bonus time. * Several teams have recently been centralized, and are now managed out of EA's HQ in Redwood Shores. This experiment has been a disaster. Remote management of employees can work, but EA is going about it completely wrong, and is causing serious damage to the studios they should instead be supporting. * Good news is shared. Bad news is hidden. It does not take a genius to figure out what the real state of things is at any given time. * Hand fulls of employees are frequently still in the office working at 3am. This is worn as a badge of honor, and absolutely should not be. * There is still too much Us vs. Them between BioWare's Edmonton and Austin studios. This has been going on for years. * To put it bluntly, open office plans suck. The official story is that it is done to foster collaboration. The obvious truth is that it is a cheaper setup, and allows companies to cram more employees into the available space. BioWare's open office plan is easily among the worst in which I've ever worked.

Pros

Was previously a great company but the culture changed.

Cons

This culture change wasn't for the better either. It reshaped the company and a lot of infighting happened because of this.

Pros

- Opportunities to work on famous and popular AAA franchises - EA's pay and benefits are tops in the industry - Good facilities with lots of perks - Inclusive workplace that values and promotes diversity - There's a sincere effort to ensure work-life balance, but that's the first thing to disappear when a project catches fire

Cons

- Studio leadership is untrustworthy, unaccountable and obsessed with politics - Bad creative and business decisions are allowed to survive for years and destroy the projects that get stuck with them - Sub-studios are the public scapegoats for the Edmonton mothership's failures - Constant high turnover at all levels, with many replacement hires being temp workers who don't receive any benefits - After years of high-profile failures, fans and EA have lost faith in BioWare and left its future in doubt

Pros

It's BioWare! We make amazing games that you and others will actually want to play. "One BioWare" collaboration between Edmonton, Austin, and Montreal is good stuff. HR is surprisingly awesome.

Cons

Beware the Marketing department. Yeesh, incompetence personified.

Pros

Great people to work with, good focus on work life balance. Very progressive in terms of people - very inclusive and goes out of their way to make sure that people feel taken care of. Felt like the top of the management tried to take care of all of the employees as a group.

Cons

Project-level leadership can act petty at times. Management shies from confrontation, which can result in employees feeling blindsided by things. When I was let go, I felt like I didn't really have a good metric of what it was that caused me to be let go - one manager was totally fine with me and gave me good reviews, while his replacement did not.