Former Blizzard Versailles employees win appeal over redundancies that led to studio closure
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Friday 29th April 2022
Activision Blizzard
Former Blizzard Versailles employees have won their case against the late studio, with a French appeal court invalidating the redundancies that led to the closure of the branch in 2020.
As reported by French publication Gamekult, which was behind the in-depth investigation into the closure of the studio back in December, this means that the former Blizzard Versailles employees are potentially entitled to further compensations, equivalent to a minimum of six months of salary.
This would only apply to employees who choose to pursue further legal actions to contest their redundancy at a labour court.
The legal battle was looking into whether Blizzard Versailles 2020's 'plan de sauvegarde de l'emploi' (PSE, a legal framework that typically aims at limiting the number of redundancies at a company struggling financially) was justified. The court has ruled in appeal that it was not.
It's worth noting that the decision to invalidate Blizzard Versailles's PSE is a victory only in name, as the employees who were laid off won't be able to reintegrate their function, as Blizzard closed the Versailles office for good while the legal proceedings were ongoing.
The lawyer handling the case, Mehdi Bouzaida, told Gamekult: "That's the hypocrisy of this law voted in 2013: you can discipline the administration, and behind it the company, for not handling things properly, but instead of drawing the necessary consequences and prevent the reorganisation -- and in this case the closure -- things can just follow their course in the meantime.
"What this means in concrete terms is that, as soon as the administration validated the [redundancy] plan, the company sent the
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