1/5
Lead Narrative Designer
Former employee, less than 1 year
Manchester, England
Recommend X
CEO approval X
Business outlook X
Pros
Prelude
Do not work at Cloud, it is not worth the money or the stress.
Cloud will lure you in with promotions & a large pay packet – even if you have outgrown your previous job role & know you're going to quit the studio you are currently at, wait for another job, whatever big game Cloud talk in the interview stages, it quickly becomes obvious none of it is doable, and neither of these titles are launching this side of 2030.
(happy to be proven wrong though, as the resulting car crash that is Star Citizen 1.0 & Squadron 42 release will be hilarious to watch. With several key staff members finally getting a crash course in reality once the general gaming public play these games and tear them apart)
Pros
Shockingly low in hindsight, free pastries in the morning & fridges stocked full of soft drinks, along with on site barista's that make free coffee (though if you only drink Tea that's not really a benefit)
Vitality health benefits.
Free Beer Fridge on Fridays – downside of this is you're getting drunk in the office, which can go as well as that sounds.
Pool Table / Ping Pong Table.
Arcade Cabinets that rarely work
Air Hockey table – the pads have been taken away though because “it's too loud” - again, in the same area as the pool / ping pong / free drink.
Free biscuits / fruit.
Allegedly, you will be working on a genre defining once in a generation game (regardless of what project your working on), that game will never release but you will be working on it. Another review mentioned it recently but trauma bonding definitely a big “plus” of working here
Cons
Cons
About 2 months into working at Cloud you realize that (at least with one project) everything makes a lot more sense if viewed as “making a film” vs making a game
Tools being used are extremely obtuse, tech debt ridden CryEngine dev tools with a learning curve more comparable to a learning brick wall, a situation only made worse by a slew of out of date documentation persisting throughout the company in every department in terms of onboarding or training for the engines being used.
Shocking workplace culture, HR sit you down during your induction and explain a zero tolerance policy to sexist jokes / attitudes / behavior, this is something director level staff could do with a refresher on based on what gets said in high level meetings.
A historic lack of pre-production becomes extremely obvious within the first few weeks of the job, the above mention of lacking documentation extends to game documentation. With multiple aspects of the 'feature complete' titles being woefully undocumented or fleshed out mechanically, with multiple areas of the games still being under alpha tier reworks at worst, short notice overhauls dependent on the mood of whatever CEO or director is looking at the section in question.
When this is brought up, responses regarding the lack of documentation and shoddy confluence maintenance range from “yeah we know it sucks but we're constantly being pulled in too many directions” to “who cares, we're making a game we don't have time to document this”.
The people giving the latter answer would then be the same people in meetings going “what's meant to be happening here again? Why has no one written this down!” Fortunately though, director level staff do find time to write up documentation on how to effectively use the toilets.
Rampant miscommunication, multiple departments are regularly given conflicting directives and goals, these departments are told their work is the highest priority, which cascades down into resource management conflicts with downstream departments regularly suffering as a result of this.
Due to recent leaks – this type of miscommunication in the office has become even worse, with multiple departments being kept in the dark on features they are working on and what the purpose of it is even for, with nothing being committed in writing for fear of it being leaked.
The most egregious example recently being department heads not being told about an impending milestone deliverable (playable demo to showcase to publishers), despite it being known about by top level management at least 2 months in advance, only finding out about it with less than a week until the due date.
The studio is constantly flip flopping between both projects, with no clear direction on what is the priority at any given point, work will be done on one project only for it to be shot down as it can't apply to the other, despite one being an MMO space trucker & the other being a single player cinematic shooter & the obvious incompatibilities this would understandably cause on key features.
What Benefits there are are slowly being trimmed back in a cost saving method with no communication to the staff about this, a good example though is if you looked at taking the job in 2022, a on site gym was listed as part of the benefits – this gym never existed as the Manchester office is currently an ongoing construction site, and with it being pulled from the website now as a benefit & no mention of it when pressed further, it's likely just been stealth scrapped.
For a game with 600 million invested into it, cost saving / corner cutting is a regular practice despite the internal messaging (read: cope) of “working on industry leading tech”, such examples of this are heavily noticeable with audio considerations.
The company is pushing a return to office – there's not enough sound rooms on site in Manchester to accommodate the audio designers being asked to return to office, the sound rooms that are there did not get built to the recommended specifications suggested by the heads of audio.
Hot Desking has been suggested as a work around – on the open dev floor which any audio graduate will tell you makes it impossible to do critical listening skills pivotal to the job.
This is also true of the performance capture stage on site at the Manchester office, with the surrounding background noise of Manchester and construction being done nearby being audible in captured footage & audio, making asset extraction even more time consuming. Requests for further soundproofing have been dismissed, due to the risk of 'making the place look untidy'. (the place being a motion capture stage in a big empty warehouse, which looks 'untidy' by default)
when all of the above gets raised with management, it's dismissed as “well it's good enough” - which it decidedly is not for a company who constantly state it's “leading the industry”
Further cost cutting is the reported on “stealth” layoff's, with key staff members not “being let go”, instead refusing to uproot their families & lives to move from the US to the Manchester office, where they can be paid less in comparison for the same work.
To quote another glass door review - “Morale is very very low across every team. Most every department from Operations, to Development, to Marketing are all prisoner to the ever-changing whims of CR and his need to micro-manage everything. Production cannot even make a schedule that lasts a single quarter because CR/ directors will blow it up by changing their minds about everything they just asked a team to complete 5 minutes after it is done and approved.”
That is to be honest the best way to describe Cloud Imperium, the plan lasts until the CEO decides to pull rug out from under the teams involved without telling them directly.
As a direct result of this, public communication to backers is always conflicted when compared to communications internally, the biggest one being “feature complete”, which both internal written and verbal communications contradict the public message of.
In summary – just generally not a very nice company to work for, while there are some very nice people working at the company, you are unfortunately stuck working on the worlds most expensive midlife crisis.
For every nice person you will end up working with at the company, there's just generally an unhealthy work culture, with a worrying amount of 'cultists' who buy into the cope and regurgitate it, refusing to address the needed change to actually ship anything.
Instead working themselves to death because 'it's what professional game developers do' – which is a nice cope to tell yourselves when you are in the office at 11 working on features that won't make it into the game after CR changes his mind in 3 weeks, but not really something you can make a career out of.
Generally just lots of toxic behavior from all levels of staff who have only ever worked at Cloud as they scramble to be king of garbage mountain.
More power to them, but it's a lot of energy to waste on what will ultimately be an absolute nothing burger at best, an industry wide punchline at launch at worst.
Advice to Management
Advice to management
The only way you are releasing anything this side of 2030 is to step back and let someone who has released a game within the last decade take the reigns, as it is, your ego is the biggest hurdle that both projects need to overcome.
The Tech is outdated, there's never a stable build that can be played from start to finish, the 90+ hour long narrative magnum opus you think you're creating is a dull monotonous slog in places it's meant to be a bombastic pulse pounding adventure.
