Not a good company to work for. - Recensione dipendente - Artist presso Crystal Dynamics

I actually really loved working here! It was my favorite place of all the companies I've worked for. I felt trusted to make creative decisions, the work/life balance was amazing, the benefits were the best I've had, there were fun perks and swag, I felt surrounded by talented coworkers, I was happy with my salary which was adjusted each year for inflation at the very least, and I felt like career growth was more possible here than other places I've been.

Unfortunately I was affected by layoffs, which was a real bummer. There are some really bad decision-makers up top (below C-suite); people who control creative direction of projects. They are extremely slow to make decisions and change their minds constantly and there are often too many cooks in the kitchen which results in large project pivots, unclear direction in art/gameplay/narrative, and more than anything, causes sooo much wasted time and money. The company at large would be in a much better place financially if they had better creative leadership. There can also be a little too much "Get hyped cause we're the best company ever! We change people's lives! This company is so special" kinda talk in the all-hands meetings. Like, come on, it's still a video game company...they will 100% lay you off without blinking if they feel financial strain Also, something specific: they haven't done them in a while but when they do an all-company event (flying everyone in to one place) it's super awkward that they make all employees try to solve company problems, instead of working with their teams on their projects or do team building. For example, when they did their Seattle get-together they made us all responsible for coming up with ways the company could profit from our empty/underused studio space, debate what communication programs we should renew licenses for, stuff like that - it was just weird. *This con section looks large, but I really did love working here! It just takes less words to say what's good versus what isn't

- There are a handful of very talented people. - Working from home is obviously better, and it’s nice that the studio kept doing it even when a lot of other studios stopped. - The day-to-day culture is good. Most people you work with are helpful and easy to talk to. - There isn't a lot of ego, even from the weak leadership. People are easy-going, and most ICs work together on common goals without nonsense. - Even though leadership causes a lot of issues, most ICs and middle managers understand what good and bad leadership looks like, and the stronger teams can still handle things and make up for the bad direction. - Some people will complain that compensation isn't good enough, but they offer remote work, their benefits are great, and US salaries are getting very bloated, so some devs are gonna have a rude awakening if they think they can expect to get much more outside a few studios.

1. Understaffed and with a small senior talent pool. - The studio switched to Unreal Engine but didn’t spend any time making AAA tools or pipelines. People kept saying, “We’re building the train tracks while the train is already moving." - Every project has too few people and way too much work. Leadership approves goals that everyone knows can’t be finished by the deadlines they give, and none of the supposed ship dates ever turned out to be real. - There aren’t enough experienced people to build the features they ask for. They say they want quality like Sony’s first-party games, but they have a third of the staff and no one who has ever made those kinds of features before. - Even with Amazon funding, the budgets are still small (see the layoffs throughout 2025). Neither Amazon nor the studio understands AAA development, so they can’t compete at the level they want. There are plenty of talented developers available, and if Amazon wanted an easy >10-million seller with >85 Metacritic score, they wouldn't cut costs this much. 2. Mediocre to bad leadership culture. - After they lost about 60% of their staff post-Avengers, they didn’t learn much. The only thing is “don’t crunch the team,” and that might change once they get close to shipping again. - There isn’t much expertise or development knowledge in the culture. You wouldn’t know that some people have been in the industry for 20 years. Lots of leads in roles just because there was no one else, not a lot of highly specialized knowledge. - Planning usually started with unrealistic, oversized requests. Teams had to shrink those into something barely doable, and if anything went wrong, leadership acted like the team was incompetent. - You mostly end up learning how to deal with directors and office politics instead of learning how to make a good game. 3. Bad creative and design leadership. - Things always felt messy and confusing. In meetings, people kept asking what the game was even supposed to be and how the directors’ ideas were even supposed to be fun. - After this went on for years, they hired a contract design director because no one in leadership even knew how to develop a strong core gameplay loop. - All the game teams struggle to hit standards for the genres they’re working in, and it’s because they don’t have enough senior designers, engineers, or technical animators.