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Below, a King veteran who has worked across multiple studios at the Candy Crush maker outlines the five things they think have gone wrong at the company, in response to our report on the working culture at the Candy Crush maker.
It’s too focused on Candy Crush
When I worked there, the company had a massive imbalance in its priorities, heavily favouring the original Candy Crush over anything else. Pretty much every staffing question would come back to the same question: “Yes – but if those resources were put onto Candy we would make more money”.
There was a narrow-minded belief that just putting more resources on Candy would always make more money… and unfortunately the data did, to some extent, back this up – it’s a monster of a franchise and a license to print money for them.
The problem is this built an air of entitlement in the Candy team and to a large extent laziness in the team. They would become very defensive if anything about efficiency was raised. We had hard data showing that the team was slower at producing new levels than any other team in the company – worse than Soda, Jelly, Farm Heroes and the others.
Candy was slow to adopt new technology, always wanting to protect the golden goose. This caused lots of problems with the central engine team, who struggled to have meaningful impact on the team when I was there. How much this has changed since I left, I don’t know – not much would be my guess.
Other games would be charged with delivering innovations to game modes and monetisation models, and if they were successful, Candy would then copy them. That was essentially the model that formed in the company over time.
It’s driven by short term thinking
Leadership is fully incentivised to deliver against quite strict profit goals, and share bonuses are linked to continued achievement of KPIs over multiple years. So it is very much in leadership’s mind to achieve these targets at the expense of longer-term thinking.
If an element of work won’t deliver an increase in player numbers or monetisation now, it was de-prioritised. So people played it safe and things stagnated in tried and tested workflows.
Many of the mid and junior staff are graduates who haven’t worked across many other companies, or at least not in larger game development studios. So they lack the experience to see the bigger picture and problems within the team.
And many of the long-term staff, who have only ever worked at King since it was a small company, lack experience in how other companies operate. They view the success of King as meaning that they are great at their job, but this isn’t always the case. They are on very substantial salaries, as King pays employees very well.
The inevitability of Machine Learning/AI
When King purchased the AI/Machine Learning company Peltarion it was obvious what would happen. You have a large in-house dataset of levels and player data which is perfect for Machine Learning. It was only a matter of time before level designers and artists were let go.
‘Pampered’ work culture
When people talk about a toxic culture, I find that very hard to recognise at King, certainly in my time there. I know of a few people let go for inappropriate behaviour and language at parties, and it was one of the safest work environments I have ever known.
People were treated with respect and support was always there for people. So, unless this has drastically changed since I left, I don’t buy into the ‘toxic’ comments from staff. If anything, there might have been a problem the other way, where people felt so pampered that they thought it was correct to try and take offence at anything and everything.
The issue I had with the culture was the tolerance for bad management. There were a number of people who, whilst being nice, didn’t really do anything. They just passed information around, never followed up and were just there to have nice chats with people. These people were well-liked but added nothing to the company, so when you reported that middle management were being targeted with layoffs I could see why.
American influence
American companies like Microsoft and Activision don’t really ‘get’ European culture. Company emails are so focused on US issues and views that it is quite insulting at times. If they see an issue in an American studio, they’d sometimes implement sweeping changes everywhere.
The fallout from the Blizzard stories meant alcohol was banned from all studios. You couldn’t even take in an unopened bottle of alcohol for a friend’s birthday at King, even if it was not to be consumed on-site; this would be deemed a workplace violation and could lead to dismissal. They also wanted to ban the company Swedish tradition of the Helan Går drinking song at the King company conference, Kingfomarket.
Conclusion
The layoffs and reports about King’s workplace culture have been a long time coming. Sadly, there were some people who felt entitled and lacked true perspective on the situation around Candy Crush and other projects.
There were a large number of middle managers who were lovely people, but ultimately ineffective in their roles. The company had problems, as does anywhere, but I don’t believe it was a toxic environment, just ill-managed.
These changes have been years in the making and come from a lack of people driving change because the money was pouring in and people were focused on the here and now, rather than longer-term vision – with the exception of introducing Machine Learning and AI, which they were on point with…