Crystal Dynamics reviews

1. Understaffed and with a small senior talent pool. - The studio switched to Unreal Engine but didn’t spend any time making AAA tools or pipelines. People kept saying, “We’re building the train tracks while the train is already moving." - Every project has too few people and way too much work. Leadership approves goals that everyone knows can’t be finished by the deadlines they give, and none of the supposed ship dates ever turned out to be real. - There aren’t enough experienced people to build the features they ask for. They say they want quality like Sony’s first-party games, but they have a third of the staff and no one who has ever made those kinds of features before. - Even with Amazon funding, the budgets are still small (see the layoffs throughout 2025). Neither Amazon nor the studio understands AAA development, so they can’t compete at the level they want. There are plenty of talented developers available, and if Amazon wanted an easy >10-million seller with >85 Metacritic score, they wouldn't cut costs this much. 2. Mediocre to bad leadership culture. - After they lost about 60% of their staff post-Avengers, they didn’t learn much. The only thing is “don’t crunch the team,” and that might change once they get close to shipping again. - There isn’t much expertise or development knowledge in the culture. You wouldn’t know that some people have been in the industry for 20 years. Lots of leads in roles just because there was no one else, not a lot of highly specialized knowledge. - Planning usually started with unrealistic, oversized requests. Teams had to shrink those into something barely doable, and if anything went wrong, leadership acted like the team was incompetent. - You mostly end up learning how to deal with directors and office politics instead of learning how to make a good game. 3. Bad creative and design leadership. - Things always felt messy and confusing. In meetings, people kept asking what the game was even supposed to be and how the directors’ ideas were even supposed to be fun. - After this went on for years, they hired a contract design director because no one in leadership even knew how to develop a strong core gameplay loop. - All the game teams struggle to hit standards for the genres they’re working in, and it’s because they don’t have enough senior designers, engineers, or technical animators.

- Projects tend to run long - Dev cycles can be taxing