How toxic work culture ruined a great company - Story about DICE

Previously I wrote about how Toxic work culture can effect your personal development and mental wellbeing (Are you working in a Toxic Workplace?).

Today's topic is on how Toxic work culture can ruin your company and its reputation. This article is based on an extensive analysis done by a redditter named THERUSTMACHINE

If you are a gamer you already know about the latest catastrophic game, now a source of memes and humor called Battlefield2042. If you are not a gamer let me fill you in.

Back in the day, there was a small software development company in Sweden Called Digital Illusions CE, which consists of skilled engineers, creative visionaries and a great leadership. They built an amazing gaming franchise from scratch called Battlefield. What started as an idea, become one of the most successful games franchises of all time leading to a cult like following.

They had an good team culture, great work environment and freedom of creativity. Many articles were published about their success story and their values. They were treated as a text book example on how a small set of highly talented individuals can delivery great results.

This success brought in so much wealth and attention to this company. As a result a billion dollar publisher acquired this company back in 2006. After that everything started going downhill. They lost team work, they lost most of the senior employees, micro management was introduced and good people started leaving.

Their latest AAA game by DICE Battlefield2042, released on November 2021, was developed without listening to the end users and was a text book chaos. It lost 90% of the user base within the first 2 months. At the time of writing only few hundred gamers are playing and its only being 4 months since release. There is an on going petition seeking refund on this game and DICE is no longer a fan favorite.

Employee Feedback

These are some honest feedback posted by employees of DICE throughout the time. This explains how Toxic Work Culture can ruin a company in no time.

"The game studio is divided in siloes that don't share the same goals. This leads to dysfunctional communication, lack of progress, as well as a lack of a clear vision. Strong presence of office politics; persuade the right people, "play the game", and pretend like any issues are non-existent to maintain a facade amongst people."?- May 2019

"Mass exodus of talent - lots of people leaving (senior people - some who have been there for 15+ years). It is apparent that there are massive gaps that will be very difficult to fill."?- July 2019

"Creative leadership appears totally clueless. More often than not, their vision raises eyebrows, questions, and concerns. They push their ideas through anyways. Be prepared to work on systems you do not believe in, but leadership is convinced will be a smash hit."?- July 2019

"Be realistic about your plans. Massively increasing scope when we have already agreed on deadlines is a recipe for disaster. Scope creep kills projects and is something to avoid instead of something to practice. If you dismiss someone’s fears and it becomes a reality, you should probably take what they’re saying more seriously. Especially if it’s coming from more than one person."?- August 2019

"Being a visionary isn't necessarily a bad thing but they have failed to inspire confidence in that vision. Instead, they did the exact opposite by forbidding negative criticism and discussion as their way of addressing low morale and skepticism. This, among leadership's other consistently backwards ideas and policies, just reduced morale more and more. The worst part was that it wasn't hard to see why their vision wouldn't work. Leadership was just stubborn and refused to back down or admit that they're wrong even after negative reception from nearly all parts of the process. Instead, leadership chased their vision even harder."?- August 2019

"Too often middle management and company leadership is bottlenecking production with vague ideas or goals. Some decisions make zero sense and hurt the overall production and no one is held responsible if it doesn't work."?-?September 2019

"There resides an arrogance in the company, based on historical achievements from previous games in the earlier DICE era. This is toxic and is often used as a morale booster when things go sour in the community."?-?September 2019

"hierarchy and nepotism has led to many poor decisions"?- August 2020

"The work environment can often be toxic with bad displays of behaviour especially in the leadership ranks. There is a general lack of compassion from the top down where you are really made to feel like you are just a resource that is there to deliver results. A lack of clarity and direction in the products makes the development process chaotic, frustrating and leads to crunch."?- October 2020

"Top-heavy decision-making. Most of the time it feels like someone high above decided something and that is the law. When employees bring up feedback it's already too late because EA already signed off on it. Problem is that they tend to sign off on something completely overscoped."?- May 2021

"Management has no idea what they are doing"?- January 2022

"Management have forgotten what a Battlefield game is. They ignore valid feedback and criticism from the developers."?- January 2022

"The horrible management and decision-making is abysmal. I have almost 20 years of experience and I've never worked in such a disorganized place where we redo the same thing over and over again due to a lack of vision and effective decision making. This contributed to the worst work-life balance I had in my career so far."?- February 2022

Analysis of events

As per Volympos here is the analysis on how Toxic Workplace culture destroyed this Company within few years.

• Some time during 2017, there was a big shift in DICE's upper management as a lot were nearing retirement age and were looking for the right employees to replace them.
• The management is apparently a tight-knit group of people who look after themselves before looking after the rest of the company/products being developed. Different game development departments are their own 'silos' as they call it, with little communication between each one and a middle manager often without a video game development background. All of this has resulted in lots of office politics. This also affects game development; assigned development time is not based on what enhances the quality of the game, but on how much your manager likes you.
• The new management team seems to be arrogant based on DICE's enormous past success, and has a lot of new questionable visionary ideas concerning diversity and inclusiveness they want to include in the new games. Skepticism and constructive criticism from employees, of which there is plenty, is ignored/muted/discouraged and data is blatantly manipulated to give weak arguments during meetings.
• Despite overwhelming criticism and negative feedback raising concern about fanbase acceptance and gameplay quality, design ideas from upper management get pushed through.
• Employees who 'get with the program' are rewarded and easily promoted regardless of the quality of their work, while senior developers voicing their concerns get sidelined.
• Even though there is relatively little 'crunch time' (work overtime when a game gets close to its release date, Swedish culture prides itself on quality work/life balance), these unwanted visionary ideas get added to developers' workloads without extending their deadlines. This causes stress, tasks that are not finished when handed in and a sense of 'I don't agree with what I'm doing'.
• Battlefield V is released, receiving criticism for its design choices and unfinished state.
• Despite the backlash from the community, the new management team does not hold itself accountable for any mistakes and remains tone-deaf to feedback or suggestions from its own developers. Managers get promoted after a horrible game launch because of office politics.
• During 2018/2019 lots and lots of senior employees, people with 10 to 15 or even more years of experience in video game development, leave DICE for reasons listed above. These are the people that made BF3/BF4 etc.
• Nothing changes (apart from crunch time becoming much more prevalent) and it seems to get even worse, with reviews from 2020 onwards stating how management is a mess without any clear sense of direction and how they flat out refuse to listen to any of the developers, or anyone for that matter. Employee turnover rate has increased dramatically.
• 2021 Nov - Battlefield 2042 is released, receiving criticism for its design choices, unfinished state and, now unsurprisingly, lack of core gameplay elements from previous Battlefield titles.

It seems DICE as a company changed its creative direction and told its entire workforce to go away if they disagree.

Many replied in kind and left, taking their wealth of experience with them, and the company seems unable to keep new hires for very long due to the now firmly established toxic company culture and increased workload as a result of lost knowledge.

Companies in this situation usually either 'fundamentally change their company culture' (a nice way of saying they'll hire a big consulting firm to come up with a new workplace culture blueprint while swapping out the entire core management team) or go bankrupt.

Fixing rotten company culture is very expensive and time consuming, during which the company will function way below normal output levels.

References:

1. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/you-working-toxic-workplace-asiri-dalugoda/
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield2042/comments/stzztw/messiest_company_ive_ever_worked_for_read/
3. https://www.glassdoor.co.nz/Reviews/DICE-(Sweden)-Reviews-E598397.htm?filter.iso3Language=eng&countryRedirect=true
4. https://www.change.org/p/sony-allow-refund-for-battlefield-2042-on-all-platforms
5. https://www.newsweek.com/battlefield-2042-refund-petition-demand-ea-xbox-playstation-steam-1678398