Pluspunten
Great level of material comfort, a whole building located near Opéra (nice view of Paris from the rooftop), gym with showers and locker room, cafeteria with snacks and beverages, good salary, reasonable work hours, friendly and passionate colleagues
Minpunten
I was supposed to work on an upcoming mobile so-called "role playing" game which had been stuck in development hell for a few years and I doubt it will ever come out: if it does, I'd wager it will be released in such a sorry state that nobody will actually care. From what I heard (written information is virtually non existent in this company, which allows for better management control, I guess), the game's development had been rebooted at least once, although the game was almost ready to be displayed on application stores back then. Facing the Sisyphean task of always redoing the same work over and over again, many developers and artists felt discouraged then left the company... Or were pushed away. It was the first time I discovered a project with no planning, no budget, no bug tracking, no task management, only the arbitrary, absolute power of one man. I'm not sure Pretty Simple is actually capable of releasing anything else than Criminal Case games, whose value lies in polished graphics and intricate plots rather than deep gameplay. One might reckon this situation is due to under-skilled employees, but I highly doubt that. During these few months I had the privilege to work with talented minds who taught me a lot. Unfortunately, even the most brilliant orchestra, composed of gifted musicians, will produce a catastrophe under the baton of a foolish and narcissistic conductor. This is the tragedy of Pretty Simple, its one fatal flaw, the one thing that will eventually spell the company's doom: toxic management. Corentin, who oversees the development of the game and vainly tries to micro-manage every single aspect of it, is a prime example of what you could call a "toxic jerk" or a paternalist egotist, whose ignorance only rivals his arrogance. One week after I joined the team, he told me in private "Among the 120 people that work here, 20 are competent, while the other 100 are retards. Choose your side" (sic). This wasn't a joke, since he considers his employees to be mere pawns in his game and despises most of them. In a workshop, he will not try to solve issues thanks to collective intelligence, but rather to prove his intellectual superiority by demonstrating he's always right (such a fragile ego...). If an idea doesn't come from him, it's immediately labeled as "garbage" and rejected: he won't hesitate to tell someone to shut up and listen, because "people should remain silent when there is someone smarter in the room" (i.e. Him) and he's trying so hard to "raise people to His level". When boarding the project, I expected a responsible CEO committed to his company and the people who trusted him; instead, I found a patronizing, overgrown adolescent playing with the company like it were a toy car. Pretty Simple employees deserve a better management. In conclusion, I have no other choice than strongly advising you against working there. Unless you are in desperate need for quick cash or a first job experience in the video game industry, turn away and don't waste your time. A final word of warning: since Pretty Simple hasn't been able to release a single game for years, it is now the laughing stocks of all other video game studios in Paris. 3 years of experience at Pretty Simple aren't worth 3 years of experience in an actual video game studio and I know former colleagues who had to undersell themselves in order to get a job elsewhere.