Vantaggi
Central location of the office, good work mates, games across a variety of genres.
Svantaggi
One of the big issues at NaturalMotion (and it seems they are completely blind to this) is that _all_ of the projects there go on forever. There's a project there that the CEO described as "bread and butter" project in terms of how simple it is and that project has now gone on for about 3 years and just got restarted again (so back to preproduction). The original people left on this 30 something team is about 15%. This issue stems from the fact that the management is really, really keen on getting involved in all aspects of the development and in the end, you basically become a cog in the wheel who just does what management says. Since the feedback loop is so long, they spend a massive amount of time and effort into putting these things into motion, then realize it doesn't work and then there's a lot of back and forth meetings and whatnot. This ultimately results in couple of things: 1) The team who actually works on the projects comes out of them drained, demotivated and feeling they haven't really learned anything - thus, they leave the company 2) The game probably will be a success, but at the cost of basically losing a lot of people and "restarting" a portion of your company This whole shuffle has massive repercussions for the whole company - the retention is sky high, there is no HR policy and the retention in the HR team is massive as well. There is no management training even though it has been asked for for two years. There is no transparency, they don't do company surveys and present what's good and what's bad or any action points related to that. After the Zynga buyout, a lot of the projects have been Zynga-ified even though promises were made that this wouldn't happen. Zynga's people are a constant presence and even though some of them are nice people, there's some interesting character traits amongst them - one of the producers came over to help on a project, was booked into a nice Oxford hotel about 10 minutes from the centre, but refused to live there since she had to take the bus every morning...