Ubisoft boss suggests development requires "friction" as publisher deals with cultural crisis

gamedeveloper.com:

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has expanded on comments he made during an interview with Canadian outlet La Presse in which he appeared to suggest toxic behaviour in the video game industry is partly the result of the "friction" needed to create games.

When asked by the outlet why the game industry has been plagued by reports of misconduct and toxicity, the Ubisoft boss indicated that there needs to be a little friction in the production trenches to deliver success.

The comments drew ire from some corners of the industry, not least because of Ubisoft's own struggle to deal with numerous allegations of harassment and bullying that indicated the Assassin's Creed publisher had cultivated a workplace culture where serious instances of misconduct were endemic.

In 2020, Game Developer published a report based on testimonies from dozens of current and former Ubisoft employees that suggested the company spent years building its workplace culture on a bedrock of toxicity and deniability. The report contained allegations against multiple senior Ubisoft employees.

Since that report and others were published, Ubisoft workers have banded together under the A Better Ubisoft (ABU) banner in a bid to hold management to account and usher in meaningful reforms, and the group maintains that higher-ups at Ubisoft are still refusing to meet its demands. Notably, ABU also seemed decidedly unimpressed with Guillemot's latest comments.

In a bid to quell the frustration and disbelief sparked by his comments, Guillemot provided a statement to Axios to explain that when he spoke of there being tension, he was referring to the "creative tension that is common and vital in innovative companies like ours."

Guillemot said that at Ubisoft employees "have