An Ubisoft developer I chatted with back in 2022 was feeling pretty jealous. Elden Ring had just come out and was blowing people away. Despite FromSoftware’s reputation for challenging gameplay and esoteric design, the open-world RPG was breaking out into the mainstream. It was a hardcore game but it wasn’t only being enjoyed by hardcore gamers. Ubisoft had thousands of people working on open-world RPGs for years. Why couldn’t it make one that felt just as creatively bold, vibrant, and potent?
A version of this question has been haunting the French publisher since Ghost Recon Breakpoint bombed back in 2019. It wasn’t a terrible game, just kind of a bland and boring one. It became the poster child for the bloated Ubisoft blockbuster that felt designed by committee for no one in particular. Co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot promised sweeping reforms to get to the bottom of what was going wrong with the publisher’s production processes. Over five years and several organizational “resets” later, it’s not clear the company has gotten any closer to an answer.
The untenable situation blew up again this week with Ubisoft announcing major delays, cancelations, cost-cutting, and restructuring that will result in some big short-term operating losses and more long-term uncertainty. Ubisoft’s market cap before Breakpoint was close to €10 billion. It’s since fallen by 95 percent to just €500 million. The news was jarring, particularly to the more than 15,000 employees across the company’s global network of studios who found out the news alongside everyone else in an end-of-day message from the CEO.
“A boss run wild”
“The strategic and organizational changes we will make in the coming weeks and months will propel Ubisoft into its future. They will allow us to reconnect with our DNA – that of one of the largest and most storied video game companies in the world – and to regain our creative leadership as well as our competitiveness,” part of it read. It went on to explain a new, less bureaucratic structure for decision making and organizing franchises like The Division and Beyond Good & Evil while also noting that there would be more pain to come as management continues to “make difficult decisions, including stopping certain projects” and “potentially closing select studios.”
Slipped in between the grand vision and subtle threats was the reversal of a popular hybrid work-from-home policy that would have a direct impact on everyone working at Ubisoft. Staff would be back in the office five days a week, but with the promise of a generous number of work from home days. “The intention is not to question individual performance, but to regenerate our collective performance, which is one of the key elements in creating the best games with the required speed,” Guillemot wrote.
There was immediate confusion and frustration. One French union representing Paris Ubisoft developers called for a half-day strike. “It is out of the question to let a boss run wild and destroy our working conditions,” Solidaires Informatique wrote in a press release. “Perhaps we need to remind him that it is his employees who make the games.” Even more colorful quotes were given to French news broadcaster BFM TV. “[Guillemot] is senile like Donald Trump,” one anonymous employee told the network. “He is losing his mind, we need to get him out of the company management [board]. He is screwing up everything and f****** the company.”
Return to office talent drain
Employees have been venting directly on Ubisoft’s internal messaging board as well, based on screenshots shared with me. “A full return to the office will only cause a significant amount of essential talent to leave the company, and nothing is being done to prevent this,” wrote one developer. “Why is top management not taking responsibility or accountability for the many errors and mistakes in the past? Instead, only workers are suffering the consequences.” Another wrote, “Since I joined Ubisoft, I’ve seen more change in the RTO policy than the company’s improvement and success.” A third did not mince words. “This is probably the most embarrassed I have felt working somewhere,” they wrote.
Particularly galling about the new return-to-office policy for some Paris staff was that they had only recently finished negotiating to ensure two days of work-from-home per week. “It’s only been six months since the situation was more or less ‘back to normal’ and now it’s shattered to the ground by Yves’ sole decision with zero justification, zero documents, zero internal studies proving RTO increases productivity or morale, nothing,” one developer told me.
The specific details for the rollout of the return-to-office policy have yet to be communicated to everyone, could vary team by team, and might not go into effect for much of the year. One thing that is clear is that Ubisoft is beginning to consolidate its Paris operations under one roof: the Floresco headquarters that was completed back in 2021. “Over the coming years, Ubisoft is planning to progressively bring together our Paris-area-based teams in the same building in Saint Mandé. This initiative is designed to optimize our workspace, foster greater collaboration between teams, and make better use of existing facilities, while being implemented gradually and in close dialogue with our employees,” a spokesperson for Ubisoft confirmed in an email.
Definition of insanity
There’s concern that these shifts could make it harder for Ubisoft to recruit the talent it needs to improve, or even worse, actively drive away more of the company’s existing veterans. But some employees have also shared broader disappointment with Ubisoft’s recent creative drift. “We need to stop with the trend-chasing, the trying to muscle our way into saturated markets, the sanitizing the edge off of our projects, and most of all the deciding which games get made behind closed doors,” one employee wrote this week on the company’s internal message board. They pointed to the launch of money pits like Skull & Bones and Ubisoft’s many failed attempts at live-service battle royales and extraction shooters.
In many ways, this week felt like a repeat of two years ago. The company had just canceled several games and delayed a bunch of others. It promised organizational shifts and a doubling-down on the company’s biggest franchises. The stakes were similarly high and the solutions far from clear. “The ball is in your court,” Guillemot wrote to employees at the time. Developers were furious then, too. The CEO later apologized for how the remark was phrased, but two years later some people at Ubisoft feel like nothing’s changed.
One current employee posted the following comment internally this week. “To quote one of the greatest villains in a video game: ‘Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact same f****** thing over and over again, expecting shit to change. That is crazy.’ – Vaas Montenegro.”