Storm8 Reviews

Pros

Storm8 is an great company to work for. You really get a lot of flexibility to find the best solution to any problem, and the entire engineering team is amazing. Everyone is very supportive, and everyone helps everyone else to learn and grow. If at some point Storm8 begins hiring again, I would 100% recommend anyone and everyone apply. Your personal growth is only limited by your ambition and abilities. I went from engineer to lead very quickly simply because I wanted it and I really applied myself; and my efforts were recognized and awarded. Also, when things were good. They were really good. They took the whole company to Hawaii! And bonus's are amazing. Like my first bonus ever was over 30% of total salary.

Cons

Storm8 has been having trouble finding another hit success game since their initial success. We recently went through a massive set of layoffs and we're struggling to find something to really get behind and make amazing.

Pros

Work life balance was a priority and amazing perks.

Cons

Pay structure was wacky. Raises were low.

Pros

Storm8 is full of friendly, talented people. They offer good benefits with catered lunch and dinner. The company is on an upswing thanks to their latest game finally cracking into what makes a successful mobile game in 2018.

Cons

Storm8's biggest fault is its dichotomy of thought. On one hand they want to make great games and push forward into the mobile market, and on the other they fear change and lack the courage and ability to take risks. Any risks. Almost every design decision is data-driven. The result is the company is stuck in an evolved-but-still-fast-follow mindset which makes creating original games impossible. Some of the company's most original design achievements occurred during the yearly hackathon, and those projects will unfortunately never see the light of day. Everyone at Storm8 is capable of doing so much more.

Pros

I had the greatest time working here during my early years. Everyone was friendly, easy to talk to, and felt like family than simply co-workers. The perks and benefits were great. All kinds of snacks and drinks and FREE lunch and dinner. As for career opportunities for growth, it depends on your manager. Thanks to mine, I was able to learn a lot and grow in my career. She was able to provide a lot of feedback on my work and what I could improve on in the future. If there were any issues or blockers getting in the way of my workflow, she was able to provide whatever I might need to get stuff done.

Cons

Although I was able to grow in my field thanks to my manager. I felt it was hard to transfer into other positions that you might be interested in doing. This is based on what other folks expressed to me and I have to agree. However, the biggest issue currently I believe is that they aren't making mobile games that are groundbreaking or new. A lot of it is a copycat of another game with some improvements or a reskin of one of our current games. I'm not saying copycats are a bad thing, but it would be nice if they made something completely different with some ideas inspired by other games.

Pros

People are awesome, hard working and talented. Everyone is very respectful of each other and super chill. Not a lot of drama. Very top light. Founders are super nice. Lots of real gamers work here, which means that lots of people are always pushing for fun and game-play, which is rare in free to play casual game development. Pimp your desk competition where the studio gives you money to make your desk unique. Dog friendly. Culture is somehow being kept, despite the rapid growth. There is a focus on hiring nice people. Very well-stocked kitchen. Good benefits package, gym in the vicinity is basically free.

Cons

Founders are very involved, which sometimes is bad, and sometimes good. Decision making tends to be driven by money making more than fun, but there are enough people fighting for fun that generally some fun is achieved by the time a game submits. Hard to have your hard work acknowledged unless the game is monetizing well. Loud work environment. Feels crammed sometimes. Sticking to quarterly plans doesn't always happen. Lots of last minute crunching.

Pros

- Great set of people to work with, some of the smartest and nicest people - Free lunch and dinner - Flexible schedule - Relatively easy parking - Generalist role will allow you opportunities to gain knowledge about different parts of the code base (PHP and C#/Unity), giving you a good breadth of knowledge - Architects, lead engineers, and staff engineers willing to educate and mentor and help engineering team succeed.

Cons

- Fear of using new game ideas because of lack of metrics to prove said new game idea, new games ended up being combined ideas from existing games on market. How can you become a market leader if you are unwilling to take risk. - Pressure and expectation to work hard and fast, and sometimes even ended up having to do overtime regularly. - Overly rigid adherence to agile process became overburdening and at times hampered productivity of entire team, despite efforts to mitigate it. - Was micromanaged to attempt to increase productivity. - Too much reliance of product's adherence to data which ended up making decisions detrimental to new games' successes. - Feedback from non-product not given enough weight. - Lack of transparency from executive level and management. Decisions about projects and games made behind closed doors and then dropped suddenly on teams either without warning or without team able to give feedback. Teams had to obtain news sometimes from private conversations! - Work from home approval difficult.

Pros

- People: teams are nice and supportive of each other - Benefits are great - free food, great insurance coverage - Freedom to do your job: we have set goals and business objectives, but at the end of the day, I am given the latitude to do my job how I see fit. - There's no micromanaging here and no one tells you that you can't do something if it's for the good of the company (of course as long as you do your work) - There's room for exposure into other areas and departments - It's sad to see all the negative comments here from our own team members. Some of them are quite shocking as my experience for the most part has been the opposite!

Cons

- Some people are very easy enough to be swayed by other people's thinking -- especially when you think that the grass is greener on the other side. People moving to find other jobs is normal, but that can be seen as "everyone is leaving!" by some folks here. - Morale can be pretty low right now, especially since we're working towards launching that "next hit."