Avoid if you are looking for a creative environment and interesting projects - Game Developer King Employee Review

TLDR: aggressive non compete clause, lack of creative freedom, big and slow corporation, boring tasks, obsolete tech, small career advancement opportunities. - 3 month notice period + 3 month non-compete period is not used to protect the company. Instead it's aggresively used to bully people who is quitting and scare people who is thinking to quit. Non-compete is even applied, if you go outside of mobile game industry. This is especially damaging, because not all companies will wait 6 month to hire you. - Work on personal projects is disallowed. Even non commercially for self education purpose. And you have to ask special permission to participate in game jams. - ‎Not much career advancement opportunities inside of Berlin studio. - Company is being run by salesmen, who have no idea of how to manage creative people. - ‎Don't believe the promotional materials on the web. Don't fool yourself, King is a big corporation with corresponding negative traits. - ‎Company management goes not follow the company values it has defined. - Everything in the company happens extremely slow. And numerous middle managers makes it even worse. - ‎Decision making happens painfully slow, partially because it happens in Stockholm, not locally in Berlin. - ‎Incompetent people in managerial positions are being kept because they are close to the studio management. It hurts the teams, but nobody says anything because they are nice guys. - ‎Lack of creative freedom. Most of the time you will spend cloning features from other titles, because business analysts said so. - Business analysts have much more impact on game design than actual game designers. - ‎Work here is not about creating great experience for the players, instead it's about squeezing more money from them. - Lots of promises to improve upon negative points, but almost no action Technology - Obsolete game engine and legacy code slow down feature development. - ‎Engine team is unable to deliver quality tools. - It's really hard to push tasks to decrease the technical debt. - ‎Adoption of modern tools and techniques is happening is extremely slow rate. - Lack of technical direction. Studio actually hired a Scrum master for the role of Technical Director. - Most of work is simple UI changes, or cloning features from other internal titles. So very little learning opportunities.