A dying studio with toxic leadership that glorifies exploitation in search for a quick money making scheme. - Anonymous employee Mino Games Employee Review

1.0
Sep 21, 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Most people working there are actually super nice. - Perks are interesting for juniors, but salaries are lower than market in North America, meaning you'll be paid more pretty much anywhere else. - 100% remote.

Cons

- Huge culture change from "Making the world a better / happier place" to "creating the next multi-billion franchise". It's all about the money now. Ethics has officially left the chat. - "Company values" are used as propaganda and only championed by the employees. The Executive Team doesn't respect their own values (see the 2 points below for recent examples): - "We take care of each other": after laying off 25 % of the company, the CEO said that he will be personally available to help those affected, but he hid his LinkedIn profile for 2 days and refused to share a list of all the affected employees internally. - "We face the difficult fact together": during the layoff mentioned above, the CEO didn't even address the employees being let go to thank them for their contributions to the studio. Instead, he was busy giving a speech to the rest of the company on how everything will the fine and that "90% of the people responsible for the studio's success was still with" them, which is straight up insulting for those who were laid off. - The studios' new direction is to hire internationally in South East Asia to save cost and replace expensive Canadian roles. Those can also be fired more easily w/o legal repercussions. - Lack of transparency and white lies from the Leadership and the executive team. If there was any financial troubles, we were never made aware of it and operations never changed or adapted until it was too late. - The studio's newest project based around NFTs (that one legal and technological grey zone that nobody wants in the gaming industry and that brings no added value to society outside monetary speculation and price gouging).

Explore other reviews about Mino Games

4.0
Oct 4, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Little/no crunch except what you make for yourself. Some team members do more, but the only time I've been asked to do something outside normal work hours was when something went horribly wrong on prod. - Great people. Some of the best developers I've worked with, and very talented artists. Never heard of anyone being rude - Challenging and/or interesting code work. This might be a con for some, but there's lots of interconnecting system to wrap your head around. - CTO and engineering manager both are developers and active advocates for the team. - Never seen someone talked down to or told off for not knowing something or missing something obvious.

Cons

- Junior pay is bad, especially if you're in another country with bad conversion rates. Barely above minimum wage in some US states, below in others. - Lots of code knowledge is held by the CEO instead of anyone on the dev team, and he's often busy, making any back and forth communication limited. - Buisness, not art. We don't have a design team, it's a product team. I think I've heard "this will make more money" dozens of times more than "this will make the game more fun". This feels baked into the culture from the top.

1
3.0
May 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people, diverse opportunities, 2D pipeline which is pretty rare in games.

Cons

Started great as a company but something happened towards the end. The company put all their eggs in one basket/game and failed, a couple bad eggs in upper management. It was a slow death and it was heartbreaking to experience

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