Pluspunten
The company culture itself is great, and there are wonderfully talented people on each team in design, art, ux, research, and engineering. They provide free lunch. The facilities are large and despite the flaws in their games, they're making stupid amounts of money, so if you keep your head down and avoid confrontation (i.e an opinion), you can probably be comfortable for a while at Scopely.
Minpunten
Take a very close look at the fact that the positive reviews are all from Product Managers, and anything negative is from a different position. Even when they're anonymous, you can tell from the catchy words like "growth", "initiative", "elevation", "synergy", etc. You know, the kind of things people who want you to buy what they're selling would say. That is because Scopely is a political minefield where Product Managers reign supreme. If you don't play the game and put up any resistance to a decision a PM makes, your time at the company is limited and they *will* find a bus to throw you under and force you out. People here are exhausted by the politics and being forced to implement every idea conceived by a PM, good or bad. If something good happens to an app's revenue or retention, a PM will get the credit. If something bad happens (maybe a feature/event doesn't do so great, or there's a dip in revenue, etc), it's design/art/ux/the janitor's fault. PMs have gotten credit for features that were finished before their first day of work. We can't make the time to fix or improve something that would lead to a better user experience and overall game, but we can drag out the development of a game for an extra year so that a PM can make their team drop everything to copy mechanics and/or features from the latest app that they've downloaded. PMs have a special bonus structure that they reap the benefits of, because they control the development schedule and can manipulate it to ensure they hit their 'goals' to get that $$$. An entry level PM will not only make more money than anybody else on the team, but have more power than a senior/director level of any other role. Scopely will nickel and dime salary offers for any other department, but a PM can come in easily making 180k+ (because a VP/Director level PM ultimately signs off on any new hire on a team), and they'll get a senior/VP/duke title without resistance. PMs get promotions and raises several times a year, but you'll find people in many other positions who have never gotten a raise, and have to fight tooth and nail for title promotion. Product managers have the power to veto literally any creative decision, whether it is design, ui/ux, or art. The company is bleeding designers specifically, because PMs are either finding manipulative ways to fire/drive them out of the company when they stand their ground on perspectives that conflict with what a PM order, or they are simply giving up and leaving. To them designers are, at best, a decoration that exists to write documentation and influence team morale. A designer who expects to create engaging, innovative experiences should look elsewhere because you will just be asked to copy some feature from another app that will probably have nothing in common with yours. If the art team wants something green and product wants it blue - guess what, you're making it blue but you'll get a stern talking to about being a 'negative impact on the team' for any resistance you might have shown. The craziest thing is, most of the Product Managers at the company have no (or minimal) experience in mobile, and it shows. They have Harvard business degrees and finance backgrounds, but often no clue how difficult or easy many facets of the development process are. And yet, the C-suite thinks they are all prodigies and hands the highest level of power to some of the most inexperienced people in the company. They are also conveniently some of the most volatile personalities at Scopely. Scopely doesn't call itself a "game" company - it's an "experience" company. Their customer base isn't made up of "players", they're "users". Scopely is here to make money regardless of what they have to do to their "users" to squeeze it out of them, and making fun, high quality games is not a part of that deal. It's pretty incredible the amount of resistance there is at this company to give the creative roles the authority to do their jobs, and to keep product managers in their appropriate lane. I'd like to keep my head low, but I'm so sick of seeing good people abused and bullied out of their jobs for trying to do their jobs and make the best games they can. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.