Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-10-02
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

This is in regards to working at Turn 10
Pros: The opportunity to work on such great games as Forza and Forza: Horizon was a great experience. The art teams, Vehicle Art in particular, were amazing people to work with and made coming into work everyday enjoyable. The studio had a somewhat decent cafeteria, free soft drinks/coffee/tee and if you had to work late or on weekends they brought in food.
Cons: As an artist you would expect to be making great art. That's not the case at Turn 10. All the fun content creation is outsourced to India and Vietnam. At Turn 10 the artist basically polish and refine the assets that the vendors return. It's often tedious and boring work. On occasion you would have to model or texture something that was missed or incorrect but most of the time you were just touching up something.
The other problem with working at Turn 10 and Microsoft in general is they don't tend to hire full time. It's contracts only. If you're good and the team likes you there's a good chance they will hire you back for another contract but if stability is what you're after stay away from Microsoft/Turn 10. Also, you don't actually work for Microsoft you work for an outsource agency that hires you out to Microsoft. This way Microsoft doesn't have to pay you benefits or profit sharing. You can get benefits from your agency but probably not as good as Microsoft gives to its actual employees.