Submitted 1 day ago by carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone to games@lemmy.world
https://www.dualshockers.com/ubisoft-closes-canadian-studio-after-it-unionizes/
cross-posted from: lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/36712639
Ubisoft’s first North American union, located at their Halifax, Nova Scotia studio, was certified on December 18th, 2025. Now, not even a full 30 days later, Ubisoft Halifax is closing.
It’s so easy to not buy games. When was the last good game they made? I guess I’ll continue to ignore their catalog.
“we’d rather amputate that entire source of revenue than pay workers fairly”
Capital would rather burn everything down than lose a penny to the working class. Yes in this example, highly paid developers are considered working class relative to billionaire owners
I like to think that we’re all working class, and that to subdivide classes further benefits only the capital
Everybody who has to work for a living is part of the working class. Further division is just “divide et impera” by the owners.
highly paid developers
Not in the games industry, lol
Higher wage working class is working class. If your income doesn’t come from owning things, if you put in work to get your income, you are working class. Division among ourselves only weakens us.
Devs are working class
Because they actually work on products literally, they’re the base of their profession with pretty much nobody under them bar a few juniors if any
I fear the day when being a dev like me becomes so normal I make minimum wage and can’t afford anything anymore… It’s seriously terrifying to realize I worked and learned all this time and it may be for nothing in like 10 years…
it’s not even just about the money really. it’s just as much about control. you have to make an example of any uppity unionizing peasants right at the start, lest you end up with your entire corral of cubicle drones strutting around thinking they have some kind of say in any aspect of their work environment
100%. I always ask people to look at their tax return. Does your money come from your labour/work, or from the things you own? If you aren’t living off of the things you own, then you are working class.
If your income comes mainly from your work, you’re Working Class (even if you own you own business), if your income comes mainly from the money made by the money you have (in assets or even “investments”) you’re Owner Class.
Certainly, modern politics only ever divides people in those two classes, with mainstream parties generaly only working for the good of the Owner Class which is how you end up with falling salaries in real terms and growing Asset valuations in the form of bubbles on all kinds of assets, most notably stocks and realestate (notice how most mainstream politicians see the rising of both stockmarkets and also house prices - tough of late, they don’t say it about the latter quite as openly - as being good things).
The single greatest scam of modern Neoliberal Capitalism was making people who own their means of production but still have to work for a living think they’re not Working Class and hence Neoliberal Capitalism was actually working for them.
highly paid developers
You’re not familiar with the games industry are you?
Their wages are significantly lower than related software fields of similar skill sets.
how highly paid are we talking? I doubt they’re making 200k
keep in mind that Canadian tech sector wages are not on par with american - as a rough rule, just keep the dollar value and change the currency (i.e. 100k USD salary is 100k CAD salary)
Capitalism will let us all eat shit and die and still cut that shit with the last of the Amazonian sawdust.
“we’d rather amputate that entire source of revenue than pay workers fairly”
Oh come now, Its not just about money.
Its about making sure frat boy culture of sexual harassment and assault continue unabated.
i’ll bet you anything the higher ups crunched the numbers and realized that was the case. your boss’s boss’s boss doesn’t give a shit about any of you and ONLY cares about maximizing the bottom line, regardless of who gets hurt
“hey know how we cut a few developers loose and they created an iconic video game without our oversight? Should we do that again and forsake all profits and consumer goodwill a second time??”
Cue that Ants scene… they want to nip resistance in the bud, before it grows too large.
The open corruption and lack of empathy for the working class is just embarrassing. I hate EVERY company now since they only care about shares. They don’t even consider us as human, we are simply just tools for them and can be thrown away at any moment.
Solvent corporations shouldn’t be legally allowed to dissolve positions.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
As far as I’m concerned, unionization should be government mandated for every company everywhere in every industry.
But unfortunately we live in hell.
Absolutely this. We need mandated unions for every single company that exists. And with loopholes closed, like offshoring/outsourcing, corporate “headquarters” is a closet in Delaware, etc.
I get where you’re coming from but unions should not be mandated, they need to be formed for the actual workers that want things to change for the better. Just look at Sweden for a good example of how to implement unions at almost all workspaces without the need for the state to be involved.
Look at Belgium for a good example of how they are mandated.
That’s the way it works in France (and other EU countries, I assume?). We literally have to have a workers reprensative council past a certain number of employees.
As a Canadian living north of the nut-hatch, I wish I had the money to excercise my dual citizenship and get out of here to Portugal, or anywhere else in the EU.
so you are saying we can end ubisoft by simply unionizing?
Eh, we are already unionized in France. The difference is we have laws protecting workers so they can’t just shut a studio down willy nilly.
If the Canadian government were real it would exact punishing fines on the company’s Canadian held assets in response to this. And I don’t mean cost of business fees, I mean hurtful costs, because these giant fucking companies seriously damage Canadian lives when they just rugpull the labour after making massive profits of Canadian operations. There is no justifiable reason to side with Ubisoft or their scumsucking management here.
I completely agree. This isn’t so much a failure of business; it’s a failure of the government to properly hurt businesses that enact policies that hurt workers and consumers. And in democratic countries with voters, it’s also the failure of the voters.
This is why we need people like Lina Khan to be given much more power in society. There are good, liberal economists out there who understand that if you don’t regulate externalities, then market systems will cause extreme disfunction in society. Smart economists understand this, elite rich people understand it,the problem is that the bottom tier of society that is ignorant and believes in religious myths is easily deceived by the upper classes.
The result is a society with progressively more unequal wealth distribution, rapidly descending into environmental hell, with a public that is mostly confused, religious, and idiotic upset about market conditions, but glad the evil trans girl won’t be able to play softball.
All of these issues are part of the same problem: how do you convince the poor and stupid to not get tricked by the elite again? But perhaps it’s just impossible. After all, the poor are mostly religious and believe in crazy things like virgin births and flat earth… Until the poor reject such lunacy, or society becomes so awful that they are compelled to reject it, there’s really not much hope for change.
Genuinely, invest in education and you can resolve a lot of this in one fell swoop. I firmly believe that a large part of the reason the US is in its current state is because of the systematic cuts to our education system which have been happening for damn near half a century (fucking Reagan). Invest in the youth, give them the critical thinking and media literacy skills needed to draw their own conclusions, and I think you’ll have made significant progress on the issue.
Easier said than done, though, I’ll admit, and it’s a plan that operates on a pretty goddamn long timeline - a much longer one than the current critical situation is likely to allow us.
My 10+ year long Ubisoft boycott still looking like a good idea.
I started to Boycott Ubisoft when they started online DRM checks for single player games that you could not play offline anymore. It was with the release of Assassins Creed 2 and I think it was Settler 7. That was about 16 years ago.
I started to boycott Ubisoft when I can’t think of a single game of theirs I would even want to play.
Eh, I haven’t boycott Ubisoft. But also, they don’t make good games so I haven’t bought any either.
indeed
Wow, a whole unionized and competent studio now free to pursue internally chosen productions? I sure hope they don’t get some of those “Canadian Heritage” media subsidies. Seriously though this is the shit the state should be funding, it’d be a shame to have this kind of resource squandered.
Yep. Rename to Unisoft and start making good games.
Scarcisoft?
Ubisoft just continues to be awful.
Ubisoft is just seeding their own demise.
They weren’t my favorite studio before, but they’re definitely never getting another dime from me. There’s a lot of fish in the sea.
Ubisoft has been utter shir for more than a decade.
I used to love Prince of Persia, I tried to play Warrior Within half a year ago, that’s how much I love it.
But it hasn’t been the same, it’s just generic shit all over the place.
It amazes me that anyone played any far cry or assassins creed game in the last 10 years and went “yes this is a good game”. All they make is bare minimum surface level crap and it’s been that way for a loooooong time.
For Honor was their last good game.
This particular studio is responsible for some of their best titles.
Now all Canada needs to do is legalize piracy on Ubisoft products.
Right… They closed it as a “cost-cutting measure” and “not because the studio unionized”. This is where the lawmakers are just letting everyone know that they are garbage to be walked all over. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that “cost-cutting” a studio that just unionized is because they unionized, because a union means they have to start paying their workers their fair share, which means “higher costs” to them, when it should’ve been like that from the start.
How does this sort of thing usually get handled in Canada anyway?
A lot of the reasons unions form in the USA are mitigated by Canadian labour laws. So you generally only see them in large work forces such as government employees, school teachers, and trades. People already get severance pay based on length of employment for getting fired without cause. If you’re laid off you can get EI (60% wages from gov’t).
So to answer your question… nothing probably -though I am speculating. Unless they did something egregious they likely broke no laws.
Anti-union industry is vast.
You have advisors that have preprepared media statements, threats, worker conditioning propaganda, etc.
But ultimately it’s the govs issue not to enforce the law.
When the butchers at a single Walmart successfully formed a tiny union, Walmart responded by firing every butcher in every store in the company and switching to pre-packaged meats only.
Whelp, I already de facto boycotting Ubisoft since I’m a patent gamer. Guess I’ll actively boycott them now.
Patent gamer?
You only play original ideas?
Nope, I only play games that are heavily discounted or given away
No they only play games while in the hospital
It’s double funny because it’s pretty much the opposite of what it was meant.
So apparently being a French or Canadian company doesn’t necessarily mean that you respect or understand unions, I thought that was mostly American practice, I was wrong
French companies outside of France might as well be American with the way they treat non French workers.
That’s because they all adapt to local workers laws. That’s how you know they would absolutely fuck us every which way if they could, hence why we (French people) need this sort of reminder.
Alas I doubt this would even show up in the news.
Almost any large capitalist company, especially those that are publicly traded, will devour its own in the name of higher Q3 profits.
Anyone notice that Halifax is spelt 3 different ways in the article?
My personal favourite is Hailfox.
Faxy Lody
Boom Boom!
But what does it say?
LMAO, a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard, how do you even do this?
a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard
Maybe the author has a Dvorak keyboard layout (a and o are next to each other there).
I see only see Hailfax but maybe they corrected the fox one.
capitalism is terrorism
Painful, but these companies need to fuck off then.
Ubisoft is a dumpster fire of a company I'll never buy from again.
How convenient this decision was supposedly made prior to the decision to unionize and is related to only financial issues.
I bet they are always discussing what studios to cut or downsize in case of “economic downturns” or “failing to meet quarterly projections” so they can’t be accused of union-busting or retaliation.
I think we need to learn more about the union movement in Canada and US. People fought and died over these rights. Companies and governments forgot unions were the agreement we made to not drag their asses out in the streets and beat their asses.
It would do those in power to remember this compromise because we are getting ripe for another wave of work reform.
Part of the problem is, back in the day you had company towns. And everyone knew where the boss lived. In the big ass house just outside of that shit hole town. So it was pretty convenient to go grab your pitchforks and rifles and walk half a mile while your rage built up.
Today you probably don’t know where your boss lives. Say you managed to find out. Supposing he doesn’t live in a different state, you get your guns and pitchforks and start marching. The cops will stop you before you get to that nice neighborhood.
Just pitchfork him when he shows up at work lol
I guess I will continue to not buy their games. I’m lucky they make it so easy by making so many bad games.
Could workers not form a ‘dark union’, gathering members from as man different companies as possible without informing the employers up-front – gathering a strike-pay war chest before announcing any unionized shops? Then the next time they pull this, everyone everywhere quits out of solidarity. Draw from the war-chest to pay workers while the companies panic, and then dictate fair terms to return to work.
B-b-but I thought it wasn’t about unions…
It’s about sensitive company knowledge!! such as uh…, the fact that we’re union busters
Stopped buying Ubisoft games for years. Don’t even play the ones I already have. It’s been a crappy company since at least Assassin’s Creed 2 single player always online pioneering
I have this rule; if a game requires 8 GB as minimum requirements, then DO NOT BUY IT EVER
Tbf ubisoft is closing itself off quite fast lol this industry is so fucked
I hate Ubisoft, but I actually do think this was decided to happen before they unionized and is just bad timing.
Decisions to close studios like this never happen so quickly and usually take multiple months between the time the decision is made to the time the actual closure takes place.
It is possible that the studio caught wind that they were being closed and decided to unionize in order to capitalize on the bad PR. But this is all speculation since we don’t know every detail, and both sides will leave out various details to give themselves an advantageous position in the conversation.
It’s possible but imo unlikely. I know its very different in a lot of ways but Starbucks at least will close a location to “save money” practically day of a successful unionizing vote. A union gets harder to squash the longer they’re around, and more likely to spread to other locations, so companies get pretty trigger happy about shuttering places.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Jesus fucking christ so blatantly evil