TALENT IS DESTINY

Great teams make great games. That’s why everything about our culture revolves around cultivating a high performance, talent dense team. We prefer the sports team metaphor to the family metaphor. We expect to run at a higher velocity, with higher standards and more focus than other game teams. 

We care about winning and we have the highest standards for our work AND our behavior. We hire slow and fire fast (as Netflix says, “adequate performance gets a generous severance”). But we also take risks and fail - after all, being wrong is just the process of getting to the right answer - and so we know performance is something that can only be evaluated based on one’s outcomes over time. 

We’re humble, low ego and high integrity. We’re excellent collaborators and we don’t tolerate brilliant assholes. 

We view the following attributes as foundational to our culture:

Audience obsessed

We’re obsessed with our players, our community, our audience. We meet players wherever they are, regardless of where they live in the world, what platform they play on, or how much money they can spend. We think the only signal that matters is whether players choose to play our games on any given night vs. all of the other entertainment choices they have. We think our jobs are not to please our boss, but to serve our players as best we can. That means always taking an outside-in perspective. It means viewing game development as our craft rather than our individual specializations. It means empowering the team to own their own destiny, keeping decision-making as close to players as humanly possible. Most of all, it means having a direct relationship with players, listening to them, understanding what they care about, and delivering on their needs. 

Optimized for great judgement & the long term

Great judgement and mission alignment are cornerstones of a culture of freedom and responsibility. If these two requirements are met, we can decentralize decision making, move faster, and have a higher hit rate. We look for people who can adopt an owner’s mindset, who abhor waste and spend resources wisely, and always act in the best interest of the company. We look for people who think from first principles, who can make brave, bold decisions with limited information and a high degree of uncertainty. We’re playing the long game - so for us, great judgement is always long-term. We’ll trade short-term gains for long-term value all day every day. That’s why we invest in our people learning and becoming more well-rounded as developers, that’s why we’re only trying to make deep, thousand-hour games, and that’s why we view retention, not revenue, as our god-metric. 

Biased towards action & results oriented 

We believe that action creates information, that learning starts when you put pen to paper. We know that bold vision AND disciplined execution are both required to win. We would rather be fast and experimental than slow and perfect. We believe in small and mighty teams that can accomplish more than they’re supposed to. We look for people who act with urgency, are intolerant to bureaucracy and are prolific in their output. 

Grateful for everything, entitled to nothing 

We take nothing for granted; we know we’re in a street fight for our right to exist. We believe the team comes first, the self, last. We look for people who are hungry, humble, and still have something to prove. We’re not in it for the free snacks, we’re in it to make something that matters for players.

Strong opinions, weakly held 

We know that sometimes we have to be willing to be disagreeable to get to the right outcome. We need to be able to talk about anything; no sacred cows. We prefer to be blunt in our approach to feedback. We prefer to be brutally intellectually honest, but also to constantly seek out alternate perspectives. We look for people who are able to update their prior held beliefs based on new information, fast. We look for people who always grapple with the facts - even when the facts tell a bad story. In order to operate this way, we look for people who possess higher-than-average grit and resilience and we spend time investing in team bonds and relationships so that the trust to speak freely is there.

1% better every day

We know there’s always a better way to do things - we just need to learn it. When something goes wrong, we don’t externalize blame; we ask what we could have done differently. We’re self-starters & auto-didacts. We believe feedback should be 25% positive, 75% developmental. We look for people who are naturally curious, always learning and intrinsically motivated. 

Spiky 

We don’t have to be the best at everything, just the few things that matter. We focus relentlessly on those things and allocate resources the same way. We don’t have to build everything ourselves, we are happy buying a solution when it isn’t differentiated.