-Pay is outrageous. Industry veterans and newcomers alike make minimum wage or barely above.
-No benefits, no insurance, no retirement plan – even if you’re salaried. Not even a sick day policy. Multiple instances of employees catching COVID and being asked by the CEO to work remotely despite being ill.
-Baffling vacation schedule. Thanksgiving and MLK day are unpaid holidays, but Christmas and the 4th of July aren’t? Also, employees are required to use PTO for any time taken off, meaning that many national holidays will eat into their already meager benefits.
-No innovation or creativity. Most games are reskinned, repackaged, and resold multiple times (Cooking Mama: Cookstar and Yum Yum Cookstar are a prime set of examples). “New” projects are constructed almost entirely from Unity Store templates or are carbon copies of market competitors.
-Many projects are overambitious, mismanaged, and cancelled before they can be released, in some cases being shelved due to legal complications that the CEO had failed to address. Despite their horrible track record, the CEO and 1st Playable’s main publishing company (formerly Galaxy Games, now Planet Entertainment) get along great, ensuring that 1P always gets funding for future projects. If you’d like to learn just how great they get along, google “Cooking Mama Lawsuit.”
-There is no investment in employees. Company culture is very sink or swim, and there is no employee training or performance reviews. One or two good samaritans look out for the new hires and give advice where they can, but most of the senior management feel disconnected from the rest of the company and kind of apathetic.
-If you are not a programmer, do not expect to get raised without fighting for it. Raises do not happen for artists or designers unless employees threaten to quit or manpower is so low that someone needs to be raised just to keep a certain project afloat.
-There is a general sense that the company views its people as expendable. Employees old and new are let go without warning and without severance pay, often at the end of project cycles, and always to make room for college graduates that get paid minimum wage. If you somehow get past entry level at this company, do not expect to still be employed within a year.
The CEO:
-The CEO is every bad boss you’ve ever had rolled into one. She is snotty, manipulative, cheap, and abusive to everybody she works with. The vast majority of 1P’s failings can be attributed to her incompetence and malicious exploitation of her employees.
-Loves to criticize, hates to give advice. “Constructive” criticisms always are bookended by brags about how experienced she is, and she often punches down at employees.
-Interrupts constantly in meetings (even with clients present!). No respect whatsoever for group communication or teamwork. Her way or the highway, etc. She sometimes pulls employees aside for 1 on 1s to insult them or belittle their work.
-Gaslights constantly. You and the CEO will agree one minute, and then the next she will tell you that she never agreed to anything, and how dare you try to pull the wool over her eyes. Unclear whether this is due to active malice or a sheer inability to communicate, but she always treats it as the employee’s fault. Every conversation ends up feeling like a fight.
-She is never up front about anything. Uses scare tactics or outright lies to prevent people from asking questions about clients, projects, or company policies. Most of what she says about the company and its goals are contradictory and only serve to keep employees under her thumb. Anytime an employee does ask a question, it is always seen as an attack, and treated as such.
-She is just totally, hopelessly incompetent at her job. Because she’s always shooting down conversations, employees are left with no direction and no real goals. She is a project manager on paper, but the company and its projects are actually managed behind the scenes by the employees themselves (these employees are not officially managers and, apart from sometimes being underqualified, are often pressured into taking on far more work than their job descriptions allow).
-Instead of overseeing 1P’s projects from a distance like the CEO that she is, she tries to be everywhere at once in a directorial role. This stretches her way too thin and causes a massive lack of supervision, which contributes to the aforementioned lack of direction. It is common for weeks to pass without any communication, and then suddenly she will just show up at your desk and bombard you with questions, completely ignorant as to what you’re working on or why. Inevitably, she realizes that she’s out of the loop, at which point she blames the employee and disappears again.
-She does not know anything about the game development process, doesn’t play video games, and is completely tech illiterate, which is insane considering the type of company she runs. She’s barely capable enough to run a Zoom call.