-Cronyism:
The staff is composed of several massive cliques that span departments, mostly composed of corporate fashion yuppie, snobs and/or mean girls
No matter what your experience level is in the game industry, your opinions do not compare to the giggling mass majority of the cliques.
If you push a point based on your previous experience or tenure, you are laughed at and called a gamer elitist. Imagine Heathers with no Winona Rider.
-Borderline Racism/Sexism:
Over 90% of the staff is White. Over 60% of the staff are Caucasian females that have
no game industry experience besides their time at Arkadium. Most come from fashion or marketing backgrounds
The entire production team was female except for a JR Producer who was a H.S. Lacrosse coach before being hired.
Meetings look and sound like the cast of Desperate Housewives without Eva Longoria because she's Hispanic.
No ethnic diversity what so ever, I met a total of three Asian people and no African Americans or Hispanics out of a fifty plus person staff. Nothing but lots of white females.
-Incompetent Management:
Everything is run by committee. There is no chain of command, just heads of cliques. Design and Production meetings are routinely hijacked by junior members of the art, marketing, design and production team. Game design and production calls were dictated by a newly hired UX designer who was best friends with a senior clique member.
On average twenty hours of my forty hour work week was spent in meetings in which nothing was ever accomplished.
For example: A weekly mandatory 2 hour all hands meeting where every week different staff members are forced to create goofy PowerPoint presentations to educate clueless members of the staff about gaming trends.This eats time to prepare and time to attend.
This meeting is where the upper management cheerleaders would brag about how awesome their favorite clique were and how amazing the company is. The two owners Jess and Kenny attend but only pay attention to the popular people.
After eight months in development and personally three months of working on a product, there was nothing to show for it.
Raising flags only serves to single you out.
Pointing out poor existing process and asking the power to make changes makes you a complainer and you are made to be at fault.
After leaving, the company broke the contract to create the product. No game shipped and everyone on the game except the cliques were let go.
-Lack of Gaming Savvy or Interest:
Completely devoid of any game design expertise or creative vision for their products.
One of the worst game design teams ever.
Archaic, unoriginal designs with little understanding of social or mobile space.
At best, a poor ad-ware game company with a God complex.
Few staff has any real interest in games, and if they did they are either jaded or have given up.
ZERO game culture.
-Company is run like a Fashion Agency:
Like most of the staff, their products look great but are anemic throughout and no fun to play with.
Dress code is not stated but is worse than most corporate fashion companies.
President Jess told me on my first day:
"We're not some gamer geeks in a basement eating pizza and chugging beer... we have million dollar clients like the Jets coming through this office and we dress to impress them, so if that means Gucci, Prada...then so be it. Understood?"
My EP that literally spent her entire day running meetings or coming up with new types of meetings to "improve productivity" but without any realization that nothing was being accomplished because of so many meetings.
The least Agile company imaginable.
Training classes, peer mentoring and corporate education are spoken about like scripture but their dogmatic methods and views end up with no real takeaways.
If any of these other reviews contradict this one... they were written by members of one clique or another.
Comments about "great place to start in the game industry" and "tons of experience gained" are based on completely on inexperienced popular employees that were allowed full reign to do whatever they felt like and fail upward through the company.
