Ubisoft Montreal in Turmoil Amid What Developers are Calling Broken Promises

ign.com:

On September 11, most of the over 4,000 employees at Ubisoft Montreal returned to office in Montreal’s Mile End for the first time in three years. But hardly anyone seems happy about it, and many are furious at what they’re calling broken promises from Ubisoft leadership.

Since Ubisoft Montreal announced that employees would be returning to the office beginning September 11, the studio’s intranet has been lighting up with posts ranging from mild concern to outright anger. IGN has viewed a number of comments on the situation across multiple Ubisoft internal postings, including over 270 comments on the announcement post alone - almost all of which were negative.

Many of the comments list numerous issues employees have historically had working from the office before as reasons not to return: noisy calls in an open office, increased expenses, and a lack of sufficient equipment or accommodations. But the anger also runs deeper than the inherent problems with returning to the office. Amid a wider company culture of layoffs, game cancellations, and abuse allegations, this mandated office return seems to be the final straw for a number of employees who feel that Ubisoft management’s indifference to its workers has gone on long enough.

Ubisoft’s overarching return to office plan across all its studios was first kicked off in the summer of 2021, roughly coinciding with widespread availability of the first vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic. But in Montreal, where Far Cry 6, Roller Champions, For Honor, and multiple Assassin’s Creed games were made, employees tell IGN that the company’s publicly touted plan simply…never happened.

Instead, they say they were reassured repeatedly over two years that they could remain 100% remote