Former Lost Ark employee paints bleak picture of Amazon: “A culture of slander”

Former Lost Ark employee paints bleak picture of Amazon: "A culture of slander"

There was a short thread in the Lost Ark forum created by Games Specialist Mateo. In this he announced his departure and was very negative about the job at Amazon. He criticizes the work culture, lack of bonuses and lack of passion. The thread has been deleted, but screenshots of it can be found on reddit.

What does the employee say? In his forum post, Mateo criticizes Amazon for four things in particular:

  • The little room for maneuver in customer service
  • No bonuses or salary adjustments
  • The bad working atmosphere and a “culture of blackmailing”
  • Lack of studio passion and strong focus on numbers and finances

According to Mateo, working in the gaming industry is a dream for many. But many of the employees who work for Amazon Games are disappointed in their jobs.

The thread was only online for a short time and was then deleted. A screenshot of his post can be found among other things on reddit. However, this thread was translated using Google Translate. You can find the original German article at web.archive.org.

Little scope for problem solving and frustration due to a bad working atmosphere

What exactly is Mateo criticizing? The Games Specialist begins his farewell post by explaining to players what room for maneuver people have when it comes to customer support. According to him, this is severely limited:

  • You could teleport people to another location
  • You could restore characters (under certain circumstances)
  • As a third option, they looked at the standard guide for the game and only gave tips that you could also read online – for example on Google.
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The second major point of criticism he mentions is the appreciation of Amazon. There should be no bonuses, such as Amazon games for free, and no salary adjustments due to the current high inflation.

But even apart from material things, the appreciation of the employees should be almost non-existent, which has a negative effect on the working atmosphere:

As an employee, you are not relevant here, this is also communicated quite openly and a culture of blackmailing is always encouraged and demanded. A terrible working atmosphere from my point of view, I can’t recommend it to anyone.

Mateo emphasizes: If an employee says that he can understand the annoyance that the player is experiencing, then that is actually how it should be. The customer advisors are said to be constantly disappointed by the circumstances.

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Lack of passion and too much focus on numbers

How does he see Amazon Games in general? In addition to the criticism that affects his position in the company personally, he also talks about the general direction of Amazon Games. Here he criticizes that there is a lack of passion and that the focus is too much on numbers.

He believes that the reason Amazon will never have great success in the gaming industry is because all the talented people with passion would quickly find they couldn’t get far here and leave the studio:

Amazon is purely monetarily driven and games are not a passion. Other game providers also have problems, but the really successful ones all have one thing in common: the passion behind them […].

What Amazon has never understood and will probably never understand is that acting exclusively according to logic and numbers works in retail or production. But games and gamers are something you need passion for.

Players had hoped things would look different at Amazon Games

How is the community reacting to the thread? Most commenters on reddit are dismayed by the statement, although many are not entirely surprised. There have always been negative reports around Amazon about working conditions (via Business Insider). However, many hoped that at least the gaming division would look better.

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The user coldfries finds the fact that there is also a bad working atmosphere at Amazon Games “really very sad”. User Laxxz writes, “Nothing people didn’t suspect, but it’s something damn different when it’s written in yellow font.”

Some admire Mateo for the thread, after all he probably violated internal guidelines. But others also criticize him for washing dirty laundry openly on the forums afterwards.

What does Amazon say? So far there is no official statement from Amazon. We at MeinMMO have already contacted the studio and asked for a statement.

An employee of Star Citizen recently expressed criticism of the payment of his studio:

Employee says: “457 million €” MMO Star Citizen pays so badly that employees have to move back to their parents

Reference-mein-mmo.de