Splash Damage Reviews

Pros

Good environment, good work-life balance

Cons

Very few actually senior devs for the amount of juniors

Pros

a) Very experienced management team b) Friendly and enthusiastic developers c) Good onboarding procedures d) Above average benefits package

Cons

Unfortunately, company is located in one of the more expensive parts of London. Therefore, working from the office can be expensive

Pros

awesome projects and awesome people

Cons

time spent there to short

Pros

A lot of the co-workers are fantastic. Work culture depends largely on the team you end up working on. I was lucky to work on some relaxed projects with great people. Due to the low salaries, they are quite willing to take on less experienced staff and it can be a good place to start your career.

Cons

Salaries are very low. Getting a raise depends on how close your are to Senior management and not on your performance. There is a total budget for raises each year that gets mostly used up to give the directors bonuses and leave producers unable to give raises to over-performers in their care. Generally producers and leads don't have much power to help out their team and management often even overrules creative decisions in games they are not involved in. Because of this they constantly lose the most skilled workers, becoming a business model that will be untenable in the long run. The Management is very opaque about their goals and approach. They constantly call new projects 'promising' and 'everything is going great' and then scrapping them on the next day without warning.

Pros

Company centered in the well being of the employees

Cons

Nothing to comment about here

Pros

Great benefits Cool Projects Top notch communities with in the company

Cons

Having a hard time finding its stride with many of the projects mainly due to lacking staff. Low salaries(with promises of improvements "soon") Bad HR

Pros

Really fun and very enjoyable

Cons

not very high pay but also not all the time

Pros

The company has been silently pivoting away from work for hire and into full ownership and publishing of our games, it also almost doubled its size after the Tencent acquisition and there are multiple big projects in different stages of development

Cons

It can still feel that the company needs to find its footing processes-wise in some areas but trust on studio leadership is high

Pros

-Great benefits -Positive work culture -flexibility -Great IT and support

Cons

Pay is slightly below average

Pros

Very nice people and culture. Friendly and accommodating to everyone. Very inclusive atmosphere. Great company values. Excellent out-of-work activities. Offices are wonderfully kitted out with awesome canteen, places to play snooker and relax, etc. Flexible working hours and hybrid model. Really suits young professionals coming into the industry. Pay is good for the industry and they seem committed to ensuring they lead the way here. With Tencent's backing, they feel robust and unlikely to be issuing layoffs. They have carved out an obvious niche in multiplayer social gaming and have a real sense of purpose to deliver that. Tech stack is generally modern and the games being worked on have the potential to be big blockbusters! Exceptionally good employee feedback mechanisms - if something is not right they will do their utmost to fix it. They have great self-awareness as a company and invest highly in this so any cons I've cited below will 100% be not a shock to management. They want to be as transparent as possible. So far great work-life balance (although I've not had to see through a crunch)

Cons

The company is going through a transition from "work for hire" to being the master of its own destiny. There is quite a lot of process and this can hamstring some of the creative chaos required to make great games. It has led to a "build to requirements" mentality rather than a "build to make the game great" outlook. There is somewhat of an old guard here fighting against a tide of change being proposed by new hires who have come from non-work-for-hire companies keen to impart that knowledge and help Splash be as great as they can be. The company is aware of this and is trying to make the transition but it might feel a bit frustrating to come into this if you are used to a more fluid/less process-driven approach to game development from an established company who "know how to ship games". Unfortunately, there appears to be a tendency to hire/hover in higher-ups rather than foster development from within. This means that they will end up losing a lot of their amazing culture as people who have been there for some time are forced to move jobs for promotions. I think there is a slight sense of insecurity that people don't know what they are doing so they hire a lot of "experts" who provide a lot of highly specialized advice and are more paid for having an opinion than actually doing anything. I think this has come out of a general fear that there isn't enough knowledge in the company without realizing that the most valuable knowledge is usually game/company-specific and comes from being hands-on. With the number of these "advice-givers" much outweighing those to implement things it can feel like things are talked about being done far more than things are done. There is somewhat of a meeting culture and the hierarchy is not flat enough to let people shine and get stuff done - there does seem to be a constant need for sign-off which I've not encountered before (and may be part of this work-for-hire working to requirements problem). I think they are aware of these issues it just may take a bit of time to change and give people more autonomy and trust - it is likely things will change once new ways/people have had a chance to prove themselves to be effective.