You guys need to see this because it captures everything wrong with corporate game dev right now, and I can't stop thinking about it. Ubisoft Barcelona's Black Flag Resynced team was literally celebrating their latest project just a week before they got cut — imagine the timing of that call. This internal name is already a meme among long-time fans because Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has become shorthand for "Ubisoft announces something and then cuts the people who built it." They're talking about The Forgotten City which launched on Epic with only 18 megabytes — an indie project within the larger studio that actually worked well! Yet instead of a bonus or even a thank-you, they got pink slips.
The numbers are what really make me sick because this isn't isolated to one team or city. Since October last year Ubisoft has cut roughly half its global workforce across almost every major hub — Montreal, Paris, San Francisco, Quebec City. We're talking about the same talented engineers and artists who shipped games that people actually enjoyed getting walked out of buildings instead of promoted. The irony is brutal: they made great work and got punished for it because corporate spreadsheets don't care about individual contribution once the numbers stop adding up.
And it gets worse — this isn't just a Ubisoft problem anymore, which makes me feel like we're watching a larger industry collapse in slow motion. Sony shut down Ghostwire entirely after its poor performance and thousands of others were cut as collateral damage; RockStar has laid off hundreds of developers through Activision-Blizzard layers on top of already existing cuts; even WarnerMedia/Rockstar cut over 150 Unity staff recently. Every major publisher is doing the same thing — consolidating, cutting "redundancies" that are actually just talented people they no longer need to hear from immediately after shipping something. It's a vicious cycle and I'm worried about what this means for the quality of future games if we keep burning the creative staff like fuel.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/assassins-creed/the-company-has-turned-its-back-on-us-black-flag-resynced-developers-at-ubisoft-barcelona-are-being-laid-off-instead-of-celebrating-the-series-latest-hit/
The numbers are what really make me sick because this isn't isolated to one team or city. Since October last year Ubisoft has cut roughly half its global workforce across almost every major hub — Montreal, Paris, San Francisco, Quebec City. We're talking about the same talented engineers and artists who shipped games that people actually enjoyed getting walked out of buildings instead of promoted. The irony is brutal: they made great work and got punished for it because corporate spreadsheets don't care about individual contribution once the numbers stop adding up.
And it gets worse — this isn't just a Ubisoft problem anymore, which makes me feel like we're watching a larger industry collapse in slow motion. Sony shut down Ghostwire entirely after its poor performance and thousands of others were cut as collateral damage; RockStar has laid off hundreds of developers through Activision-Blizzard layers on top of already existing cuts; even WarnerMedia/Rockstar cut over 150 Unity staff recently. Every major publisher is doing the same thing — consolidating, cutting "redundancies" that are actually just talented people they no longer need to hear from immediately after shipping something. It's a vicious cycle and I'm worried about what this means for the quality of future games if we keep burning the creative staff like fuel.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/assassins-creed/the-company-has-turned-its-back-on-us-black-flag-resynced-developers-at-ubisoft-barcelona-are-being-laid-off-instead-of-celebrating-the-series-latest-hit/