Ubisoft Employees Claim Company has Failed to Improve

Last year was… “eventful” for a lot of reasons, but in the gaming world, it was the year when dozens of studios and developers had something of a reckoning as wave after wave of women came forward with accusations of abuse and neglect for both whole companies and individuals who worked within them. The most high-profile case of this was no doubt Ubisoft, which people accused of being rotten to the core.

Since then, Ubisoft has let go of several executives, investigated several more, and replaced those let go with people who, we were assured, were going to be committed to fixing the company from the inside-out. One year later, however, a new report from a French newspaper known as Le Télégramme suggests that not a lot has changed in the company — at least according to the employees that they interviewed for the report.

Those employees are part of Solidaires Informatique Jeu Vidéo, a video game union, and presently there is talk of bringing Ubisoft to task in a lawsuit: not for any new issues that have sprouted up, but for failing to properly address the old ones in the intervening years. This action is understandable, because as long as Ubisoft’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, remains in power, then not everyone who is accountable for Ubisoft’s terrible behavior will ever truly be punished.

For what it’s worth, Guillemot claims that Ubisoft has done plenty in the past year: on top of getting new talent up top, he says there’s a new way for employees to report issues, new anti-harassment training, workplace culture questionnaires, and that they even had their HR audited by a third party.

But frankly, if you asked me to pick between believing Ubisoft is still a garbage fire or that the CEO that let that happen in the first place is telling the truth? I’m gonna go with the former every time.

I guess the courts may have to decide for themselves.