Clueless upper management & Not taking care of employees - werkgeversreview Producer bij Abstraction

-The internships are paid. - Provides option for working remote - IT & HR are super friendly.

The studio has a pretty odd culture that I found honestly kind of toxic. The art department felt childish at times, and I even heard about how they made another art lead leave the company. Interns often got misled about what they’d actually be working on, then ended up on random projects nobody really wants to do. Some interns were left completely alone on projects with no guidance, which made it feel like the studio wanted interns but didn’t really know how to support them. The coaching setup didn’t feel helpful either. Coaches didn’t really have seniority or authority, sometimes said hurtful things out of nowhere, and it felt like coaching was more about boosting their own salaries than helping interns. Overall, there were definitely times when it didn’t feel like artists on the team were treated with respect.

- super talented team and absolute great technical knowledge all at one place! Programming department is well-developed with many great career paths. - recent Virtuos acquisition brings in some very great projects. - work-life balance but varies from project to project. - 100% remote option. - ambitious projects. - management is down to earth. CEO and CTO have a background in game programming and understand a lot of game dev. You can always reach out to them, bring up criticism and they'd listen. Of course they need to lead a business and their explanations sometimes end up in weird terminology, but overall management is way less greedy than what you see at other studios. - IT and HR are stellar! you get really quick responses and feel taken care of. Great on-boarding! And if you run into issues, HR thinks in bigger pictures and consider solutions for everybody else who could be in the same situation and try to fight for benefits from other similar scenarios. - good degree of transparency. You get good insights into what potential projects are currently in negotiations and also how the company faces current problems.

- the company is a B2B service provider that could be a cultural shock for people coming over from other creative studios. This causes a weird dissonance where management is fully focused on pleasing the client and fulfilling contracts rather than considering what could be the best for the project. With Gigantic as an example, ABG did their absolute best on all technical levels but could have been way more aggressive in fighting for things way more important to players than just going with features that nobody needs (but were part of the contract). Though this was mostly due to the publisher's reluctance of public testing (raised often enough by ABG!), there's still a lot of yay-say philosophy in other projects that damage the project and the team's health. - missing seniority in non-programming fields and missing career paths. - the company is in Noord-Brabant so salaries are lower compared to Randstadt. They are quite competitive for Prod and Programming but can be insulting for any junior and some mid-level roles, especially QA, Arts and Design. - a lot of potential projects not working out for the same reasons that don't seem to be addressed. - there's no real long-term plan for the company, Really good people are let go if project's don't work out. ABG is in the toughest spot right now facing multiple projects ending roughly the same time and the company feels unprepared handling this. We are definitely surviving this but definitely feels like something that should have been foreseen long time ago.