A culture cultivating trust, psychological safety and wellbeing
At Metacore, our culture of trust, psychological safety and wellbeing is the key to our success. It helps us navigate our competitive, fast-changing environment and reach for our ambitious mission.
Our daily work together is empowered by clear ownership, autonomy and accountability. We are inclusive, collaborative and humble – and always aim to think “we” before “me.” Our passion for our respective crafts is enabled by our steady commitment to our wellbeing and the ability to truly be yourself.
Safe to say, we take nurturing our culture pretty seriously. Ourselves? Not so much.
Culture Fundamentals
Trust
Trust is the foundation upon which our entire culture is based. The trust between our teams and individuals naturally grows and deepens as we work and spend time together.
Psychological safety
When we trust each other deeply, we create psychological safety – a prerequisite for creativity and a state to freely propose new ideas, take risks, always aim high, sometimes fall short, state opinions and have constructive conflicts without fear of being punished or judged by others. We cultivate feedback and encourage people to be completely open and transparent, as it is one of the best ways to build trust and ensure psychological safety.
Wellbeing
High performance requires high wellbeing. We strive to be a workplace where everyone can truly be themselves: with their different life situations, challenges and needs. We expect aiming high and performing well, but also being there for each other in the good and the bad times. In the end, we’re a bunch of ordinary people, making extraordinary entertainment together.
Transparency
Transparency and great communication are key to build trust and ensure psychological safety.
We want to share the good and the bad and intend to have information available for everyone to ensure better decision-making and collaboration.
Our values
Our values define and guide the way in how we act and behave when working together.
Build Trust
Building trust is an everyday effort of proving to each other that we’re worthy of it. We do this by respecting each other, always assuming best intentions, communicating openly and providing constructive feedback, holding each other accountable, and always having each other's backs.
Think We Before Me
We're all committed to the same mission and goals and feel passionate about them: when we succeed together, everyone succeeds. In our daily work, we seek the big picture and context, prioritize long term over quick wins, always put the team before individuals, and celebrate successes and learnings together.
Aim High
Everyone at Metacore shares the same, extremely high ambition level – once we’re happy with our own work, we know it’s world-class. We are driven, humble, and always eager to learn and improve through feedback. United in our passion for growth, we solve some of the most challenging problems together and share learnings from our shortcomings, too.
Take Ownership
We all have ownership of Metacore; it’s always ‘we before me.’ We think about what’s best for Metacore, and promptly act on it. Even though we all care for Metacore, we all need to prioritize and focus on our own tasks. That’s why we clearly define responsibilities for each team and individual, and trust each other to carry them out .
Empower with Autonomy and Accountability
We choose to work autonomously at Metacore, and with our high autonomy comes high accountability. This doesn’t mean we work in silos – our decisions are aligned as they are based on our shared mission and goals. We keep each other accountable by giving proactive feedback. Even though we focus on strong autonomy and clear ownership, we do welcome processes and shared guidelines with fast growth and more complexity. Also, nobody is alone at Metacore. Help is always available with a low threshold.
At Metacore, leadership is a service
At Metacore, we’re led by people who are transparent, humble and eager to improve. They lead with respect, kindness and none of the ego. Our leaders are available and proactive.
We believe that high performance comes with high care: our people must feel psychologically safe in order to do their work outstandingly. While we are all in for a low hierarchy, we also provide support to foster growth. The Metacorean leader helps prioritize, sets direction and recalibrates as needed, always offering both evaluation and coaching to enhance performance. They provide feedback and candidly ask for it themselves.
How we work together
To entertain hundreds of millions of people for decades, we require diverse teams. While our skills, crafts, and personalities may differ, these business fundamentals guide us all in navigating the landscape of creating extraordinary games.
We create games for players, not ourselves
There are many ways to create successful games. The Metacore way is to create games for our players, not ourselves –we always put players' desires ahead of our own.
Even if we enjoy the games we are making, we are not their core target audience. That’s why we always validate whether our players are (at least) equally as excited about it as we are.
We are extremely market- and data-oriented
As an industry, we have a relatively shallow understanding of audiences. We want to deepen that understanding and make decisions based on data and player feedback, be it with a live game or new games development
And of course, being market-oriented and data-driven doesn’t just apply to our game development, but everything we do, whether it is our tech platform, talent attraction, IT or people operations.
We take calculated risks
There’s no denying that success requires taking risks. But we’re more likely to succeed when we take calculated risks – constantly evaluating whether or not to take the risk and drawing learnings from its outcomes.
The earlier we are in our game development, the more relaxed we can be about risk-taking and test ideas that might feel wild at first. Later on, as the stakes get higher, we become more thoughtful.. When we work meticulously, push our creative boundaries, dare to fail, keep learning, and eventually find some luck, we might succeed massively, even repeatedly.
We’re geared for constant change
The game industry and players’ tastes are constantly evolving – so we need to stay curious and hungry to better understand our industry, audiences and what works best for Metacore.
We keep challenging our ways of working and approach to game development by sharing and receiving feedback and making decisions based on data to change ahead of the industry. Change is not always easy, but we wouldn’t really have it any other way because it keeps us constantly growing as an organization, as teams, and as individuals.