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Kindly Beast, the developer of indie horror Bendy and the Ink Machine, appears to have let go almost 50 employees and has been accused of an unpleasant and precarious working environment.
As reported by Reddit user ProwlerCaboose, lots of Kindly Beast developers suddenly changed their profile information on Twitter to imply they were no longer working at the studio. Then, reviews of Kindly Beast appeared on Glassdoor (a website that allows current and former employees to anonymously review companies) on October 12.
These reviews claimed that Kindly Beast was an unpleasant place to work due to the actions of CEO Mike Mood. ‘Work was discarded at the discretion of the Board and sometimes openly insulted by the CEO,’ one review said, and the other accused Kindly Beast management of ‘consistent lies’, broken promises, and game development ‘limbo’.
‘We had a leadership structure full of incredibly successful and knowledgeable individuals who had the entire studio's best interests in mind. They were fired,’ one anonymous former employee alleged. ‘Upon the loss of these amazing individuals, we saw their policies dismantled.’ On Twitter, former Kindly Beast developers have recently posted that they are available for work and Ottawa videogame collective Dirty Rectangles directly state that something has happened at the studio.
Yep. 100% false. As a group that generally represents the Ottawa game dev scene, everything in this city is ace except what's been going down at Kindly Beast.
— Dirty Rectangles Ottawa (@DirtyRectangles) October 13, 2019
Another developer in the Ottawa area (where the studio is based) has compiled a spreadsheet of job opportunities for those affected. Kindly Beast has not officially acknowledged the reviews nor the claims on Twitter.
