Ubisoft Game Developers Have Been Leaving The Company In Droves

Employee turnover at Ubisoft has a big impact on the company's future.

Image Credit: Ubisoft Game Xbox

Over the course of the past year, Ubisoft employees have been leaving in droves. The games industry as a whole has recently lost a lot of talent, but Ubisoft has been hit harder than most other studios.

According to Axios, "The Great Resignation" is wreaking havoc on the game publisher and developer Ubisoft in what is internally referred to as "The Great Exodus," as wave after wave of resignations is impeding its capacity to function.

Ubisoft is a significant figure in the video gaming business. The company currently employs over 20,000 people in over 40 studios throughout the world. In the previous six months, the ones in Montreal and Toronto are said to have lost roughly 60 people apiece. The enormous exodus appears to have slowed the progress of ongoing initiatives.

To reduce the loss of manpower, Ubisoft claims to have hired 2,600 people in the last eight months. "Our attrition today is a few percentage points more than it usually is," said Anika Grant, Head of People Operations. "However, it is still within industry standards." Ubisoft's employee attrition rate has been claimed to be 12%, which is significantly higher than that of most of its competitors, such as EA and Epic.

Why Ubisoft Developers are Leaving the company?

Employee departures are likely due to a variety of issues, including poor compensation, more competitive employment elsewhere, creative discontent, and dissatisfaction with how HQ handled recent charges of workplace sexism and harassment, according to interviewees.

In June of 2020, workers began to come forward with claims of harassment. Many of the claims were related to sexual harassment in various ways. Several executives, notably Tommy François and Maxime Bélando, left Ubisoft when Chief Executive Officer Yves Guillemot pledged to reform. Ubisoft clarified its code of conduct and developed an anonymous complaint method. According to a business poll, a quarter of the organization's more than 15,000 employees had witnessed or experienced workplace harassment. This comes after ABetterUbisoft, a group of employees, criticized the company for making little progress since complaints of sexual harassment and abuse surfaced in June of 2020.

Ubisoft, for its part, is refusing to acknowledge the significance of the situation. According to data provided to Axios, the turnover rate is 12 percent, which, while lower than Activision Blizzard, which is dealing with an even worse workplace harassment problem, is much higher than other major publishers like EA and Take-Two.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft is aggressively recruiting to make up for the losses. Its bare-bones Splinter Cell remake announcement was followed by a request for people to join the studio to work on the game, an unusual step in normal circumstances. The corporation also appears to be more focused on how it can incorporate NFTs into its games recently, despite the fact that many who have left the company claim that it is neglecting internal problems.

Ubisoft is now experiencing a significant amount of change. Where the company goes from here is debatable, but employees must be included in the process.