Despite Ubisoft seeing quite a bit of success with the recent launch of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the company is continuing its cost-cutting efforts, with its Barcelona studio being the latest one to be hit by layoffs. Several now-former employees of the studio have spoken out about celebrating the title’s success by losing their jobs.
As caught by Kotaku, QA lead Isabel Codina García took to LinkedIn to note that “After 7 years at Ubisoft Barcelona, this is not how I imagined it would end.” She went on to say that she was “genuinely grateful for the people I have met and everything I have learned along the way.”
“Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced releases today, the project I have been working on for the past 2.5 years,” García continued. “However, two weeks before launch, the whole AC team at Ubisoft Barcelona was informed of a collective redundancy plan (ERE). Vantage Studios has stated there will not be further mandates for the Barcelona studio, despite the team proposing new AC projects.”
Ubisoft’s Paris studio programmer Matoui Chakib Souleyman has offered his own message to support Ubisoft Barcelona in light of the studio undergoing layoffs.
“All my thoughts on this Assassin’s Creed Black Flag release day go to my colleagues at Ubisoft Barcelona, who have worked on the game and are undergoing a layoff,” he wrote. “Without them, the game would not make it to release day.”
Reports about the layoffs first popped up in the final week of June, with employees announcing that they were going on strike to protest the decision. The Video Game Union Coordinating Committee said that the strikes will take place on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between June 30th and July 16th, totalling up to six strikes over the course of three weeks.
51 of Ubisoft Barcelona’s employees are said to be affected by the layoffs, and workers at the studio have demanded that Ubisoft reverse this decision and provide job security guarantees that involve shielding the studio from future layoffs for at least 5 years. The layoffs would culminate in the Barcelona-based studio losing almost a third of its workforce.
Interestingly, a report by Insider Gaming also indicates that Ubisoft’s cost-cutting plans go well beyond just layoffs. The launch party for Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced at the Barcelona studio was cancelled and replaced by a “small catering get-together at the studio.”
In the meantime, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S and has managed to hit almost 100,000 concurrent players on Steam alone. Despite this, the title has also been hit with quite a bit of backlash, with its Steam review aggregate sitting at “Mixed”, with 45 percent of its reviews being positive. Complaints largely revolve around additional microtransaction packs for the game with content not included in the Deluxe Edition, as well as a frame rate cap of 30 FPS for cutscenes.
For more details, take a look at our review, where we gave it a score of 9 out of 10.
