French Trade Union Calls on Ubisoft Paris Workers to Strike Following CEO's Comments

For context, Ubisoft is now projecting a roughly $537 million loss for the fiscal year ending in March 2023, and this comment was in a statement asking managers to reign in spending as far as possible, which is a pretty standard message.

This is just a pretext from the unions to garner support for a strike and show that their fees are for a purpose.

Of course employees want a 10% pay rise and a day less work. Who doesn’t? But is it really a reasonable time to ask for such a thing when the employer is losing hundreds of millions a year?

Guillemot would want to be careful. The French did invent the Guillotine after all.

@thefourfoldroot1 They want more money AND less work? LOL. Western society is doomed.

I am happy that at least it's happening to Ubisoft. When you copy and paste your old games for a decade you deserve this sh*t.

Normally I'd think this is taking it too far but the comments he made were ridiculous, basically blaming all the employees for the delays when it's almost certainly a management issue.

I've seen this kind of thing at companies I've worked at before. Basically "We've F'd up so you all need to work a lot harder"

Yves Guillemot's comments were outrageous. Complete mismanagement of the company for years now;
-Chasing NFTS and battle royale trends
-Investing only in mega franchises to the detriment of smaller titles

• Pulling out of Steam
• Investing in Stadia
• Doubling down on the Ubisoft open world model with little to no innovation
• Multiple Sexual Misconduct allegations and the perpetrators shielded
  etc. etc.
  Ball is in HIS and his team's court to steer the company towards a wiser and more sustainable future. A pay increase in line with inflation makes plenty of sense, many workers around the world are asking for same. And the implementation of a 4 day work week is proven through multiple studies to be more productive and better for team morale. No brainer.

I think we all know why Ubisoft is failing. And it's because it didn't call itself Ubihard when there was a chance.

I think Ubisoft is having trouble because they turned all their games into Assassin's Creed. There is Assassin's Creed with cars (The Crew), Assassin's Creed with guns (Far Cry), Assassin's Creed with hacking (Watchdogs), and various flavors of actual Assassin's Creed.

I like Far Cry games, but I've gotten so bored with the standard Ubisoft formula that I skipped Far Cry Primal and Far Cry 6 entirely. I completely avoid the other series because Assassin's Creed Origins bored me to tears.

@TheCollector316 I liked Far Cry than AC but after the trilogy Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, I feel I prefer AC now. Though I had a hard time liking Odyssey maybe because RDR2 was also fresh at the time. If you play these AC games with an open mind and not with the "let's hate on Ubisoft" mindset, you'll find they're pretty good. Although Ubisoft should blame themselves for releasing too many games with similar frameworks creating that narrative about them.

Won’t be long until ms “saves” the day and buys them

Maybe I'm just being naive but I didn't read his comments as "It's your fault we are in this mess! Fix it!" It sounded more like "Look, we need these upcoming games on our slate to hit or else we are in real trouble. I'm counting on you all. Do your best."

I know its easy to blame the CEO for everything (and he does deserve some blame no doubt) but the company is failing on a massive scale. There's plenty of blame to go around for how it got to this point.

Anyway if Ubisoft is to survive this ordeal a worker strike is literally the worst thing that could happen for the company. I'm all for better pay/worker rights of course but I'd say try to get the company in a better position financially before doing so or else the company could be no more and so nobody has a job then. Wait for the right moment so to speak. I hope Ubisoft pulls through this situation.

Shoutout to Gamers™️ who will inevitably be totally against this for no reason. Guillemot's comment was ridiculous and tone-deaf. Fight for better conditions always.

@InternetUser Shows how little you know of the issue. Specifics can vary wildy, but 4 day work weeks can comprise the same hours as 5 in many cases.
Of course, the idea of a 40-hour work week is a myth to millions of people anyway, which is just more telltale signs of why society is working itself to death and is poorer than previous generations to show for it.

Ubisoft is a trash company and their management is abhorrently terrible, this isn't news to anyone who's paid attention for the past 5 years. I'd love to see the workers boot out the crap management and actually save the company. I stand with workers, like myself.

@TheCollector316 most Ubisoft games are soulless affairs now too. Their games used to be so unique but now they’re 150+ hours of nothing.

@TheArt
They are high quality for sure. I am not doubting that. My issue is mostly if you don't like the AC formula, you won't like most of their games because they follow the same Ubisoft template.

@Bamila now they have a fate worse than soft and now it’s ubiflop

@TheCollector316 more like “if you’ve grown stale of ubisofts *****” AC games used to be fun

2,3,Brotherhood,4 are all bangers

@nomither6
I did highly enjoy AC: Brotherhood and AC: Black Flag. Even more so, I enjoyed Far Cry 4 and 5.

@Korgon
Fantastic comment. Agree wholeheartedly.

@TheCollector316 don't know about turning everything into Assassin's Creed. If anything, Assassin's Creed has changed more and become more Far Cry-like over the years, with the big open world maps (as opposed to city-sized maps), enemy camps to clear out etc. If you take a look at AC3/Black Flag and Far Cry 3 (all of which were released 2012-2013), Far Cry and Assassin's Creed were very different games at that point.

Far Cry has only really changed incrementally since then, whereas AC Valhalla doesn't even feel like an Assassin's Creed game any more, much as I enjoy Viking Simulator 2020

@EVIL-C LOL of course. All workers are saints that deserve everything and all bosses suck. It's not like we are all people and if given the chance we would take whatever we want and act selfishly.

Never start a business. It will ruin you.

Hey Ubisoft, make fewer games, make better games and shut up now.

@thefourfoldroot1 @InternetUser ugh, I guess you two believe the capitalist fairy tail that corporations can achieve unlimited growth and that we all can eat of the ever growing cake.
It doesn't matter if you're an employee or a boss, everyone's enslaved to this grand and self destructive delusion where only a select few will profit.

@tameshiyaku And the saddest part is that literally every other system is much worse.

4 hour strike? I can see that changing nothing.

@tameshiyaku
Lol, good straw man, but no. I simply don’t think that destroying the revenue of an already loss making company is good for the employees of said company. They are not currently looking for ever more growth, they are looking to reverse nearly $550 million yearly losses.

I’ll forgive that oversight though, because of Ono Michio.

@TheCollector316 Which one's the Assassin's Creed with assassins? I don't remember seeing that one in a while.

@Artois2 they can't with them buying Activision I'd expect them to go after them if the Activision acquisition falls through though

As expected, lots of copy pasted comments complaining about copy pasted Ubisoft games. Yet the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry titles that the usual suspects moan about are what keep Ubisoft afloat. Their underperforming Switch releases in Q4 and repeated delays of major releases seem to be the biggest contributor to this year’s losses.

Many commenters say that they don’t want the same old Ubi games but are certain that their new IPs are terrible and destined to fail. Reading between the lines, it seems there’s a sizable group that just want to see a company that employs 20,000 people burn to the ground. Schadenfreude at its best.

On a more pleasant note, I hope they get their 4 day work week.

I haven't played a Ubisoft game since Trials Rising, and that was way back in Feb 2019. They need to consolidate their studios and maintain they're big IP only. 20,000 employees is way too much. I feel like Ubisoft is going to go the way of THQ and have to sell off it's IP just to pay creditors.

@Amnesiac I don't think the complaint is about AC or FC. I think the complaint is that AC and FC's success made Ubisoft simply copy and paste those games and reskin them into a library of clones that failed to ever really perform because they were always just weaker clones of AC and FC, and reliance on success of Just Dance, forever and ever and ever as though the same exact game with new songs could never fail created trouble. I'd still like to see numbers, which they didn't provide, on just what "underperforming" on Mario + Rabbids looks like, while they failed to mention the complete disaster of multiple GaaS titles that never even made it past launch. I suspect that is being used as a scapegoat, like Square's infamous TR2013 "underperforming", without showing numbers, to deflect from having to draw attention to multiple complete failed launches. It's easier to tell investors "Mario underperformed, so we're in a hole" than "Mario did ok, but didn't plug the hole from the 3 launches that lost almost every penny invested like we hoped it might."

@NEStalgia It would be interesting to see how they handle GaaS projections considering how difficult it is to get them to stick. I understand why companies keep trying, given the long-term revenue prospects, but finding a receptive audience is a bit like winning the lottery and the failure rate is spectacularly high. Give that, I’m guessing they add a bunch of risk when forecasting for them to avoid accounting disasters.

It definitely seems like they offered up Rabbids and Just Dance as scapegoats for investors. My best guess is that they bumped forecasts up to cover holes in their release schedule and increased marketing spend to try to hit those numbers, but it wasn’t enough.

@Amnesiac Yep, exactly!

I think that's really where Ubisoft hit the buzzsaw. They generated all these hastily built GaaS products, seemingly without a particular market in mind, with the expectation at least one of them would stick the landing and bring in big money. And none but R6 Siege did, and that one never hit it to the big time. It's one thing to make the product in hopes of striking gold but expecting to lose the investment, but in the past 10 years or so it seems like Ubi bet the budget that at least one of them has to. They didn't just go deep but they seemingly just went all on on throwing everything they did at that model with the expectation it was their future. I think they understand now they did that wrong, and I think the endless Skull and Bones delays is probably about ripping the intended GaaS cash cow out of it and retrofitting it (probably poorly) into not being that. It was obvious it was "just another Ubi GaaS game" the last few years when they'd show it, and now they're showing it as more of a complete package (or as complete as a previously GaaS shell can be retrofitted into a complete game.)

I for one can not believe that Roller Champions was not the next Fortnite. Yves must be stunned.

@thefourfoldroot1 I have run my own company and am now a worker. Listen the losses are catastrophic, of course they are. But your best workers will get you out of a hole.

I'm in a strange situation myself. The company I work for has been fine - not as many sales as previous years tbf - but more profit on each sale whilst my expenses have gone through the roof. No one is offering up pay rises or appraisals (or rather a fairer change to my commission plan) but expecting more and more from the smaller level of staffing, getting paid less. It is putting pressure on all of us and I've considered leaving. How you expect workers to just sit off and put up with the cost of living crisis is over 10% inflation this year alone is beyond me. So strikes are understandable.

A four day working week is a boon for 90% of all the workforce. Three days off is great and actually makes you more productive when you are in. I swapped my own staff from 37.5 hours over 5 days (8hrs 30 mins break) to 34 hours (9 hours 30 mins break) over 4 days and it worked wonders in my last job. My current employers have now started asking us to work when we usually don't, which is the opposite.

There is more than one solution to ubisofts issues, without your best staff it will only get worse.

Management keep greenlighting *****. Monotonous games with no inspiration other than to drain many hours out of the player's life and extract more money. Also seem to be more concerned with harassing workers and didn't really address it. That falls on him the CEO. This dude has the nerve to come back on his workers. **** him.

I tried Assasins creed odyssey recently and the main screen was just a shop. It massively puts you off playing as you know the full game Is gated off and it doesn't sit right in an rpg. Make good games and then have a DLC plan if it's a hit. Ubi have got it backward with the dlc and additional purchases littering the introduction.

@themcnoisy
Appreciate everything you have said. And Ubisoft said. Specifically about their workers getting them out of a hole. And if they can then these workers will absolutely be deserving of bonuses / pay rises - absolutely.

And, sure, 4 day work weeks are shown to be very effective motivating appreciative staff (in the short term, less so in the long term as it becomes the new normal).

But to demand upfront pay rises of 10% is clearly ludicrous. And to add uncertainty of a major work time transition on top of that makes things even more unstable.

I’m a worker too. But I’m also rational and fair (I like to think at least), and employees not understanding that employers have to deal with exactly the same inflation level is tiresome and self defeating.

@thefourfoldroot1 that's fair.

But if you aim for the stars you may hit the moon. Its not so ludicrous if you have a mortgage which has gone up by £200 combined with your fuel bills and food. Travel costs, insurance, you name it, its gone up. completely unwarranted in some cases. You factor all this stuff in and someone somewhere is benefitting from this. And it's corporate greed. Ubisoft may have lost £300 mil, but they were one of the big companies to go all in with full priced purchases games as a service encouraging boosters and other nonsense. Why pay full price when there is a stacked compendium of free to play stuff on the store?

They need a change of business model. They were great at designing new and exciting games. Now it's the same old mechanics with below par graphics. Everyone has caught on and obtaining the new ass creed is only slightly favourable to catching the latest coronavirus adaptation. Again right here ubisoft championed a slim down release schedule, so it's their own making.

"Solidaires Informatique is also calling for an immediate 10% increase in workers' salaries to compensate for inflation and for the implementation of a 4-day working week to improve working conditions."

Lol, man! These unions... It's unproductive to discuss who is to be blamed. It's everyone's fault. Now, the responsibility is always on the management. The higher the position, the higher the responsibility.

But to demand that sort of thing in the exact moment where the short-term solution is clearly to cut jobs, is ironic to say the least.

@InternetUser @thefourfoldroot1 if you look at most Scandinavian countries it is clear that socially friendly structures, implemented through governments and assisted through companies does not lead to financial loss, oftentimes the opposite.
It's just that in the US and many other places corporations have turned the term unions, strikes and socialism into bad words only supported by the lazy and selfish and that is just mindnumbingly wrong.
If you're speaking about a true social democracy, then yes other systems are worse, but the neo liberalism we find ourselves in is on a steady self destructive course. Of course historically we've never seen a true communism in action, rather distorted misuse of the actually benign idea.

@tameshiyaku
Sure, it’s never worked because it’s never really been tried right? Not because of human nature.