Statements of a company’s values can run the gamut from boring, to pompous, to cringeworthy, to disingenuous — so, please, forgive us for writing a blog post about ours. They serve a purpose!
It’s important to articulate exactly what we believe and how we act as a team because it creates alignment and a shared language for making decisions together. It’s our set of ‘first principles’ that all other working agreements, processes and decisions must adhere to and support. It’s the first wiki article that a new teammate reads to help answer the most important question to orient a new team member: “Why am I here?”.
We also think it’s important to share this information publicly, because:
- It broadcasts a clear message to potential future members of the OMG team. It is, hopefully, a way to let talented developers decide whether our way of viewing the world lines up with theirs. And it’s a filtering mechanism for us when interviewing candidates to validate that they’ll be a fantastic fit.
- It makes a promise to current and future players of our games so they’ll know what we stand for, why they should trust us — and how they can hold us accountable if we ever step in it.
We’re a young company that’s early in our journey. The context we’ll share here is a constant work-in-progress. Each year, the OMG team revisits each of the statements below and evaluate whether it’s still a correct and complete expression of what we stand for and how we work. This isn’t an obsessively workshopped corporate manifesto from a massive business, and that’s by design.
Here’s what OMG is all about as a game studio:
We put players first. Game developers are entertainers. At the end of the day, we’re building something for our players’ enjoyment above any other factor. We strive to be empathetic to our players’ aspirations and feedback, and we prioritize features and enhancements for the audience we have.
We value players’ time. In 2020 there were over 10,000 games released on Steam and over 400,000 released on the Apple App Store. Needless to say, there are a lot of outlets where players can choose to invest their time. Because of this, it is critical that we value our player’s time, and do so by leading with our actions and not just words. We endeavor to create online experiences that always work during every stage of our development, and are enjoyable to interact with, even when they’re incomplete.
We make games players love. Players can tell when something is made for them. We have a deep commitment to making games and decisions with our players’ feedback and perspectives centered, and we believe this approach will result in games they’ll love — and trust and loyalty towards the team. If we focus on building games that players love, we have an opportunity to entertain them for a lifetime.
We empower the player community. Embracing and supporting what players in our community are building will create and strengthen a two-way relationship between us and our players, and help ensure we are in touch with their aspirations and desires. We know from experience that players will often build incredible things that we overlooked — from web tools to help players learn and improve, to organized competitions, to incredible fan art and cosplay. We aim to support those community initiatives with as much energy as we can muster.
We iterate fast. Listening to our players and acting within a timely manner requires quick iteration, rapid delivery of changes, and reliable services. We focus on equipping our teammates with systems and tools that enable them to deliver player value at breakneck speed.
We strive to keep developers happy. Happy developers make better games (and happier players). We value and respect our team members and give them freedom in how, when, and where they work. And we support the continuing education and career growth for our teammates (including a Continuing Education Stipend which we encourage our teammates to use for learning experiences that facilitate their career growth).
We’re inclusive, collaborative, forgiving, and free from ego. One More Game is an intentionally inclusive group of developers, and we’re fostering a supportive culture that rejects political kingdom-building, shaming, bullying and all other manner of workplace toxicity.
We're good partners. We aspire to augment our team with strong external partnerships so that we can execute at high quality without growing One More Game to a size that makes scaling our culture untenable. We can accomplish this by being an intentionally good customer, and creating a reputation that other companies love working with us. When they value the relationship beyond the motivations of their bottom line, they’ll do better work on our behalf.
Sound like a studio you want to be a part of? Get in touch if there’s an open role that’s calling your name.
