Poor company - Anonymous employee Victoria VR Employee Review

Excellent team, nice place to grow

Always changeable rules in the company

Made lots of great friends I still keep in touch with even after months and years. Working in a smaller team forces you to step up and learn new skills on the fly. The team is young and very friendly. Lots of room for self-expression and growth. The workstations are really good - everybody gets enough space and two or more 32” 4K screens. There isn't much to complain about in the office as a whole, there's free coffee and a terrace. Usually a really good breakfast on Monday. An above-average salary is achievable with respect to game dev standards. Serves the purpose if you're looking for a first stint in the business.

When I first started, I was immediately dumbstruck by the lack of grasp over what is even being created. Later on it became obvious that the grand idea doesn’t stretch much further beyond “it’s a huge metaverse in VR based on feng shui where you can do anything and pay with our crypto.” For a project about as ambitious as GTA VI, I was equally surprised by the blatant lack of true senior leadership among artists or programmers, as most don’t make it past the first couple of months. It is worth noting that the months spent developing Magic Madness - a feature that gradually got a life of its own and became a standalone game - felt much better organized, a short spark of hope that the company is capable of actual game development. It doesn’t help that high management has zero experience not only with game dev, but any sort of IT-related field whatsoever. Robert - Victoria's feng shui master and main spiritual persona - even openly admits he doesn’t play games at all, and Adam has maybe played a couple, but nonetheless never made any. To complete the bunch, Sonia - who oversees the day-to-day, I always thought to be very much a woman in the right place. Sometimes you’ll see Zbynek, who is repsonsible for milking investors and is the face of the company’s financial stability. However, he is also openly preaching the second coming of Christ and the flat Earth theory on his YouTube channel. It is no secret that the company builds its whole identity and the product around feng shui, which I always accepted snd thought that all companies have the right to have some sort of a philosophy. It does get a little weird when you find out that all number 4s around the office are scraped off, that you’re prohibited from wearing purple or using bonsai trees as decorations, or that you have to be seated in a certain direction according to your feng shui element. What I always thought over the line though is that your feng shui element dictates whether you can or cannot become a team leader. Some might view that as discriminating if they ever saw Victoria a place where they’d dare to take on managerial responsibilities. A huge red flag is the naive obsession with AI, as high management imagines it to be a do-it-all tool to cut costs and magically create their game for them. As an artist, you are constantly reminded that your team will not be receiving the desperately needed reinforcements and that you should just use AI instead. Alternatively, if you misbehave too much, you might as well be replaced by AI yourself, although nobody has any conception of what that means or what AI tools there even are. On a similar note, the current game director keeps ramming procedural Houdini-based workflows down everybody's throats, even in areas where it has no business even being considered, to the distaste of all people who actually know the whole level creation pipeline. I very much respect and love videogames as a medium, and see it as the best, most complex one ever invented, with an almost limitless artistic and technical potential. Victoria VR, however, is putting lipstick on a pig by selling a lazy hodgepodge of popular catchphrases (metaverse, VR, crypto, blockchain, AI) onto clueless investors as a revolutionary product. It was a difficult couple of years working on this half-thought "game" envisioned by the people behind Victoria, and it leaves a sour aftertaste realizing how little we share this kind of respect. I am convinced that there is no way a self-respecting game developer and enthusiast will spend a truly fulfilling time on this project, unless major conceptual changes are made.