A bad system will beat a good person every time. - Anonymous employee Creative Assembly Employee Review

Unfortunately, this once great place to work has declined quite rapidly into awful. The redundancies are one thing but it’s everything surrounding those and that caused those that are the issue. For a long time now CA has been spending like it has infinitely deep pockets, on all of the wrong things, like CA North for example. It’s not a studio, it never was and it’s never contributed to any profitable output so is just a base for the few who live up there to work from 1 or 2 days a week. They do not listen to their employees even though we are the ones seeing the issues up close and personal. In fact, nearly all of the staff that did flag issues, when something could’ve actually been done to prevent this, have been made redundant! …….those who haven’t have left anyway. Nepotism is in the higher echelons of the company and the salary divide is outrageous. An HR Director with no HR experience or qualifications being paid 6 figures. Seems like Sega has dealt with this top level nepotism though so perhaps things are looking up in that area but don’t get your hopes up. Whilst the gaming industry appears to be in a free fall, CA’s own actions has ensured the two rounds of redundancies. The first one they handled quite well, really made sure people were looked after during the process, the 2nd time they didn’t bother, guess the novelty wore off and it was just a mundane task to boot people out the door. They even had the gall to post on the company wide bulletin board that bonuses and pay rises will take place in September, that was really nice, for those of us you claim you cannot afford to employ any longer, to read. Didn’t even get a goodbye from my lead on my last day….they made it clear when it was announced in March that they do not care, but they couldn’t even be bothered to fake it or at least try and appear to be a decent human being. They will try and say the Senior Leadership Team has taken cuts as a result of the redundancies but here’s the truth; 2 were booted out for being ineffective long before the redundancies and this was down to Sega not CA! 1 resigned to travel (then recently came back as a contractor to help with redundancies) 1 (albeit not SLT but was a Director) jumped as knew the redundancies were coming and then profited out of it by coming back as a contractor for outplacement support. 1 was only removed during redundancies because they abused the redundancy process to their benefit and it backfired. The rest are all very comfortably secure! This company will throw money at employing their buddies as either fully fledged employees or consultants. But they will not throw money where it matters, which is investing in their current staff. They RARELY hire within. If you do find yourself in a job here, because everyone needs to eat and the market is brutal, and you’re not in the “boys club” whose uniform consists of shirt, blue jeans and tan shoes, or you're not one of their relatives, then be prepared to be GASLIT, MISMANAGED, UNDERVALUED and NOT HEARD.