While Ubisoft’s recent business decisions have been the subject of plenty of criticism from its own employees and fans alike, one anonymous employee believes that being hated doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t make good games. Speaking to GameFile, the employee noted the company’s seeming inability to identify and fix development issues and a general lack of accountability. Despite this, the company can still make “a big hit” again.
“Not being able to identify and fix this pattern of spiraling developments is a failure from Ubisoft management,” the employee said. “No one has taken responsibility for that failure today, and the consequences fall on development teams, through their internal dismantlement and, ultimately, layoffs. The top management walks away unscathed, questioning all but itself in this major reset.”
“Ubisoft is now hated by a big part of the public for a decade of disappointing releases, hated by many of their own developers for years of mismanagement, hated by the market for its poor editorial and financial planning,” they add. “With this amount of frustration on all sides, it’s tough to imagine Ubisoft making a big hit ever again… Tough but quite far from impossible.”
Generally speaking, the unnamed employee is still quite optimistic about Ubisoft’s future, noting that the new company structure that revolves around “creative houses” has allowed developers to be “in a structure made to address past issues, with a renewed sense of urgency for the management to support innovations.” This, they said, should give people reasons “to be hopeful” about the future.
Ubisoft had announced its “major organizational, operational, and portfolio reset” back in January, where it revealed that its various IPs were being divided to come under the purview of one of five creative houses. Creative house 1 – Vantage Studios – is in charge of the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six franchises, for example. Similarly, creative house 2 will focus on competitive and cooperative shooters like Ghost Recon, The Division and Splinter Cell.
However, as part of the process, the company also announced the cancellation of several of its in-development projects, including Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake. Along with this, it had also confirmed that it would be going forward with several cost-cutting measures, which would undoubtedly result in lay-offs.
Last month, Ubisoft Paris employees and union representatives Marc Rutschlé and Chakib Mataoui called for the resignation of CEO Yves Guillemot, referring to the company’s leadership’s actions as a “betrayal”. Mataoui called out Ubisoft’s nepotism, noting that the company faced a lack of diversity when it comes to new opinions or ideas, which is important for an industry based on creativity.
“If you just put your white male friends in [those jobs], then you don’t promote any diversity or get any new opinions or ideas,” he said. “We are in a creative job. We need new ideas to come in to [help us] make great new games. But we don’t have that. We don’t have this mindset for creativity.”
The company’s actions have also resulted in at least 1,200 of its employees going on strike in February, with Rutschlé calling out its continued cost-cutting and overworking of teams that are “already working under pressure, often understaffed.”
