Over 700 workers picketed outside the Ubisoft France office this Valentine’s Day, coordinated by a national video game industry union. The workers demanded better wages from the AAA gaming studio, which refused to compromise with the union as inflation and living costs continued to rise internationally.
“Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo” (Video Game Workers’ Union), or STJV for short, called for a strike earlier this month via a release should negotiations not be made again. It noted that wages were not increased to keep up with inflation and living costs in France for a second year in a row, and that this was an intentional move from executives given the company’s continued touted success.
“The conclusion is thus: to Ubisoft’s management, our living standards going down isn’t a bug, it’s a feature,” it explained in the February 1st release. “A company that still makes a profit, even when its execs have failed repeatedly, choosing to have its employees pay to increase its profits is plainly unacceptable.” The release also taunted Ubisoft’s “rewards” systems throughout this process, calling it “badly balanced.”
In an English follow-up on Twitter, the STJV congratulated the workers for a successful picket line, with over 700 staff, plus students and workers from other studios, joining the protests. STJV attests that the pickets were well-managed and peaceful throughout.
???????The results are in…Around 700 Ubisoft workers have joined the national strike last Wednesday! Bordeaux, Lyon, Annecy, Montpellier, Paris...Congratulations and thank you to everyone for this historic action! https://t.co/Dle5zzB9RZ pic.twitter.com/QSn3vORSvg
— Syndicat des Travailleurs·ses du Jeu Vidéo (@stjv_fr) February 16, 2024
The final tweet in the thread calls out the CEO’s strict anti-union stance: “Our message to Ubisoft’s management is clear, especially when one takes into account that the company’s CEO once paraded around saying that ‘when a union gets in at Ubisoft is when I’ll leave’.”
The CEO, and Ubisoft as a whole, is under plenty of fire as it stands. The company was one of many to hold layoffs this past year, plus sexual harassment allegations in the 2020 wave of abuse callouts led to firings but little else changed. Its CEO recently defended a $70 price point for its most recent game, the very troubled Skull and Bones, which releases this week.
France is one of the most proactive about worker and citizen rights, with a reputation of protesting over what many other countries would consider minor changes. Recently, Paris seemed to go up in flames over retirement benefit age raises. American organizers are hoping to catch up, with Activision-Blizzard workers holding a walk-out about its sexist work culture in 2021, and both Riot in-office workers and esports players holding walk-outs in regards to, respectively, similar work culture conditions and negative league changes made without warning.
