Posted in: Games, Ubisoft, Video Games | Tagged: gaming, ubisoft, video games

New Report Claims There's A "Mass Exodus" Happening At Ubisoft

There's a new report making the rounds this week claiming that Ubisoft's employees are in the middle of a mass exodus from the company. The report is coming from Axios, who are saying that over the past 18 months, there has been a steady rate of longtime employees who have been departing the company. Not counting the departures and removals that have been attributed to the Me Too movement back in 2020, which saw several top-tier developers and management be removed from their positions, people appear to be leaving in droves through resignations to head for different gigs or just to leave the industry altogether. Here's a snippet from the report.

• Top-name talent is leaving, with at least five of the top 25-credited people from the company's biggest 2021 game, Far Cry 6, already gone. Twelve of the top 50 from last year's biggest Ubisoft release, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, have left too. (A 13th recently returned.)
• Also out are mid-level and lower-level workers as headcounts drop, particularly in Ubisoft's large and normally growing Canadian studios. LinkedIn shows Ubisoft's Montreal and Toronto studios each down at least 60 total workers in the last six months.
• Two current developers tell Axios the departures have stalled or slowed projects.
• One developer recently said a colleague currently at Ubisoft contacted them to solve an issue with a game, because no one was still there who knew the system.

Axios' reporting is presented more in a bullet-point style with facts they've gathered than trying to explain through a standard story, so there's a lot that can be lost in translation looking over the piece. But it appears that ever since those initial investigations back in 2020, a lot of people at the company took a hard look at where they were at and what they were experiencing ranging from their treatment to the work environment to morale to pay, and made the decision to exit.

Many of the employees, who spoke off-record, spoke fondly of the company with some saying they might return. But there are also stories in here that talk about how one employee tripled their annual salary by going to another company for the same job, which is a bit damning of the company's structure at the moment. We'll see if this has a bigger impact as time goes on with titles currently in development and other content being made for established titles, but the reality is this is the kind of thing you don't see measured in weeks or months. Its probably going to be another year of watching the company's growth and release schedule to determine if this is hurting them.

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