For those who want the truth...brace yourself...we’re going for a long ride! - Anonymous employee PLAYMIND Employee Review

TL;DR (In short) : CEO gets involved in everything all the time. With his enormous ego and lack of knowledge, he’ll ask unnecessary things and will take wrong decisions constantly. He’s having a hard time hiring or keeping his employee because he’s underpaying everyone. Prepare to be consider as a cheap and replaceable asset. With your bad salary in mind, you’ll need to work hard to deliver everything that Playmind’s need (without pre-production and without any form of production pipeline). Prepare to fulfill crazy demands at the last minute to satisfy the client needs whatever they are. Also not helping, there’s no seniors and they have a hard time finding more, especially programmers. Even the few they have are in a constant struggle against the management. Teams are full of juniors that manage to be brilliant enough to fix and patch errors from the top and make projects work. You’ll feel like you’re on the edge, almost falling down but for some reason you keep yourself hanging on. 1. The President / CEO One of the first person you’ll meet at Playmind is the CEO. From first sight, he seems like a good and professional guy, but it’s the complete opposite. He’s a often lying to its employee, telling something to one person and then telling something completely different to another later on. He’ll say what you want to hear and will often sound like a good guy to get what he wants. He'll make you feel guilty for his own mistakes. He has no idea how to lead or handle a production (never worked in video games, never shipped a game on his own) but he still do it and gets involved. Any attempt to fix issues in the company fails because of him (stopped for lack of budget or he knows better then anyone how things should work). He has the biggest ego you’ll ever see. He’s sure he knows everything and his mind's totally closed. He also got this mentality of always being right in a conversation. As soon as you’re trying to tell him your opinion, he’ll answer back countering your point and making you see he knows what he’s talking about and what he's doing (you can clearly hear he has no idea what he's talking about). It's like listenning to flathearthers but for video game production. To be able to share a point of view or opinion, it’s a process that can take several days or months. Unfortunately, good luck contacting him in the first place. He’s rarely answering emails or Slack messages. He’s always “busy” or out of town for events. When you get the chance to meet him at his desk or in a meeting, most of the time he’ll watch his PC or phone (notification sound always ON...really annoying). For some reason, the President became the expert in every field possible. He knows everything in Programming, Animation, 3D/2D Art, Networking, Game Engine, Console, Mobile, IT, etc. It’s strange to pretend you know it all when in fact you know absolutely nothing. Reality is quite different. Not a gamer (almost never played a game in his entire life) and not a developer. Never studied in a program affiliated with video games. Never had a role in the production pipeline of any project at Playmind (Creative Director is just a role he gave himself to satisfy his ego). Lastly, he isn’t really interested in the projects we’re making. He’ll never ask questions or play them and has no idea what they are or how they work. When asked about a project and its details, he’ll tell some random general uninteresting stuff since he got nothing else to say. But whatever he’ll just randomly show up in a meeting or to an employee and ask something (visuals, features, etc.) he wants us to add. Out of nowhere, he gives us those random tasks even if he has no idea of our roadmaps, current sprint or state of the project. Often, these are unclear, makes no sense or doesn’t fit at all. He’s clearly not suited for the job but still, he’s the one taking all the important decisions. He’s this one manager constantly messing things ups that you’ll need to fix or deal with for your projects needs. 2. A good employee is a cheap, faithful, obedient person with experience As soon you enter the company, you’ll feel like you’re getting scammed. Salary negotiation is rough since they want to give you the minimum they can. The contract is really specific in some of its details for no reason. This is a small studio where your job will constantly change and you’ll be asked to touch on so many different things. You’ll fulfill many roles and help satisfy many holes in your team, so why be that specific in the contract like if we’re working at Ubisoft? You’ll also be asked to follow the Playmind’s employee guide (the company’s rule). To this day there's still no copy of this document available. It was all a lie but they still expected us to follow these constantly changing guidelines (adding or changing them from out of nowhere!). Freelancers watch out because you might be gettint paid months after you've done your work ! Now let’s say you’re a junior coming out of University with a bunch of games in your portfolio. Playmind is offering you a full-time job and you accept. You’ll be paid the minimum according to the market. You’ll be asked to do everything on your own since there’s probably no mentor and/or no one else in your fields. Their excuse for such a low salary? And Why you should be grateful to work there? Obviously the response : it’s a privilege to be at Playmind and you’re really lucky! I even heard: “No one else wanted you, but we hired you. Be thankful !”. It’s always like we owed them something for some reason. Salary negotiation is really hard since their rule is the cheaper the better. They’ll always propose the lowest possible, prepare to fight to get higher pay. The only reason they’ll pay the right price is for a really good and impressive employee. If you’re not that gem they’re looking for, why invest money on you? So, unless you were that senior from Ubisoft, good luck having what you’re worth. President’s on a never-ending quest for the perfect employee (which doesn’t exist). This problem is recurrent and has a huge impact on production since we’re having a hard time finding help.. For every good candidate, its just not worth it to invest money in them. Help we asked is always late or never came and you just keep doing everything by yourselves. It's cheaper to keep things as they are and results should be delivered anyway. Hiring process takes months if not years and is only pushed or forced to conclude faster when people quit (the question is: would they have hired a new employee if the person didn’t quit...probably not). In the end, your value is underestimated since management knows nothing about game development. They think they’re sitting on a pile of gold coins, when in fact there’s also ruby, sapphire, and other gems. People leave after a year and they lose all these valuable employee that worked so hard and has such an impact. Want be treated like a working machine instead of an actual person with feelings, Welcome to Playmind. 3. Clear lack of expertise and seniors A typical team at Playmind is formed of a majority of new interns or old interns that became Lead in their fields after their internship. Seniors are as rare as Unicorns. Thankfully they added a tiny bunch recently with the start of new projects. Yes, they’ll work with you, but fields are so cut in multiple instances specialize in specific projects that you’ll probably never have access to their knowledge. Different projects aren’t even using the same engine or technologies. In the end, everyone’s alone in a corner dealing with their own problems that only them can really understand. The only other type of person you could encounter at Playmind is something even rarer, an employee that’s there for more than 2 years. Everyone is around the one year mark and leaves as projects end. Nothing really keeps you there professionally since there’s no potential to grow, learn and surpass yourself. You’ll feel like it’s a waste of time for your career. It just feels wrong to be considered a Lead Developer or Lead Artist when it is your first job in the industry. 4. You’ll see shady business practice and money not well spent straight in your face As a software engineer, we quickly learn to be really conservative when dealing with clients. As you’re the expert of a field completely unknown to the client, you’re the one that needs to be putting the barrier and limit of what can be done. Clients often love to share their view and put their judgement on the table when in reality they’re mostly wrong as they’re ignorant and lacking knowledge on the subject (but since they’re paying for your service, they feel the right and power to tell you what they think, it’s fine and it’s your job to listen). As the expert, you’ll filter the information/requests given to you and identify the reasonable middle between what is feasible and what the client asks. In the end, what’s important is to deliver what was wanted and everyone will be happy. In order to determine what can be done, you also need to always have in mind your possible resources and the timestamp available for production. All this process apply to video games since they’re also software. The problem at Playmind is they’re doing the complete opposite of what I just explained. They’re listening to their client as if they were their god. They’ll do whatever they ask, fold to their demands and trust them. Managers act like experts when they aren’t and answer important questions or accept to add new features without consulting their experts (the developers). This puts the team always in complex situation with impossible deadlines. Every project is the same, no plan upstream or pre-production. As soon as the client and Playmind agree with each other, managers describe the task to developers. It’s always baffling to see what is asked and the features they’re demanding within a timestamp always too short. Projects start in a hurry without planning when in the backgrounds contracts aren’t even signed yet. Most of the time, we’ll deliver a product rarely in time that isn’t fulfilling all our engagements or promises. This is such a nonprofessional way of doing things, I just hope clients realize what’s going on and decide to do business with another company. About the money, let’s start with the basic, they’re often using free or unpaid license for developing software. People that left never get their vacation money and freelancers wait months to get their check. Personal Money and Playmind’s Money are all in one big pile called the President Budget. Bills will be delayed to later dates for lack of funds. Money is spent on goods or resources we don’t actually need. Thousands were lost in an attempt to Everything went to trash and then he tried all over again using a good amount of that precious development money for a huge overkill server. Now it works, but we almost never use it. Money receives for a specific project are often use for other purpose which is illegal. Overtime is a forbidden word at Playmind. Every hour you work in overtime will be registered and you’ll be forced to take a day off according to the number of hours worked or else you’ll never get paid. Sadly, there are often events for different projects and they’ll need your help. Why would people invest their personal time if they’re never going to get anything back from it? 5. Good luck staying there in the long term if you’re looking for growth and progression in your career. As your working hard making things work, management will always do the same mistakes over and over again putting obstacles on your way in the process. There’s no will to achieve long term goals. In every studio, you’ll work with a mindset of using what you’re developing right now in the next project or made it usable if we ever need it. Not at Playmind. Everything is badly developed on the rush to deliver in the short term. A client wants this in one month, deliver. End of the story. Good luck implementing a long term development philosophy. Any efforts to do so will be worthless unless there’s money to be made. There’s absolutely no project rotation (ex: after completing a mobile game, you’re tired of mobile and want to go work on pc game. No you’ll stay on mobile forever). Also, there’s almost no future and no long term possibilities. Don’t expect promotion you’ll have to fight for it. In fact, they’ll probably hire new people instead. You’ll basically stay where you are, doing the same job day after day for the rest of your time there. Since you’re cheap and doing all the work, it’s perfect and they want it to stay that way. Don’t expect to be consulted to know how you feel (no company or employee review at all). There’s nothing you can do unless make your way to the boss office to share your view. Shared mine a couple of times, never worked. 6. Problems aren’t treated or taken into account. The company ends up with a bad reputation and wonders why. Problems I mention everywhere in this review has been communicated multiple times to managers and head of Playmind (Emails, messages, appointment in the president room, meetings with managers and team members) Everything was tried by both long term employee and new ones without success. The president’s huge ego and closed mind prevent him from understanding his company issues since, from his point of view, everything has it should be since he decided it that way. People let it go and solutions were applied by employees themselves without the consent of managers to try and fix things up, but they were always taken down or taken care of quickly. It’s kind of ironic because, at the same time, we’re told that things are going to get better and change for the best. They never deliver anything in the end. The promise of change never happened. This problem and these trust issues from managers end up creating exactly that, trust issues from the employees towards the administration. As you can see on other reviews and from what people say about the company, it’s rarely good and Playmind has earned a bad reputation. Everyone knows that since the president is “deaf” (never listen), his company will never change. Developers are now avoiding and fleeing Playmind as if it was spreading the plague. Good luck hiring! 7. Weird and cringy people give a bad vibe on a daily basis In short, it’s just so you know that there’s a lot of cringe there... 8. Please don't go there! Please don’t apply there. For the love of god, stay away from there, unless you’re very desperate to find a job. For me, every problem I mention completely silenced and eliminated any good that I had the chance to witness at this company. After working there for almost a year, I quit being completely tired dealing with all this constantly. In hope of change, I tried one last time to explain every single problem to both managers and they never listened to me. The company stays in the same bad place. Everyone is running away from there, everyone wants to leave and go elsewhere. Playmind is actually a good place to look for new candidates for jobs. This and the fact that a good part of the company exists because of external financial support. Without them, Playmind is actually 8 people (3 HR and 4 devs) instead of 30. Since projects are never going well and don’t financially work, they’re probably going to lose their financial support at some point and close the studio or shrink to what it was at start. I genuinely hope this doesn’t happen for people that are there and have nowhere to go.