Least we forget, Ubisoft is a studio that is mired in its own controversies, with a sexual harassment scandal that broke in 2020 that saw the removal of executives and upper management, a drop in employee retention, a lawsuit from a French game workers union, and reportedly continued mismanagement according to devs and their proto-union while the company offered pay raises to stanch its talent bleed.
The company’s myriad controversies reached as far out as Ubisoft Singapore as the studio, readers will recall, was reportedly a morass of harassment itself that saw its associate director leave. This prompted an investigation last summer by Singapore’s Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices (TAFEP), which recently concluded and found that the studio has the systems in place to handle misconduct, that past reports were handled “appropriately,” and that according to justifications from the studio, all salaries are based on experience and seniority and not race.
Meanwhile, the VP at Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovations Lab Nicolas Pouard was interviewed by Australian website Finder regarding the company’s failed NFT scheme in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which saw Pouard state that the studio would keep “experimenting” and “releasing features and services around this first initiative” despite fanbase objections because players simply don’t get it, man.
“I think gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring to them. For now, because of the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe it’s first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculation. But what we [at Ubisoft] are seeing first is the end game. The end game is about giving players the opportunity to resell their items once they’re finished with them or they’re finished playing the game itself.
“So, it’s really, for them. It’s really beneficial. But they don’t get it for now.”
As a final cherry on this Ubisoft sundae, Ubisoft Montreal announced that its battle royale shooter Hyper Scape will be shutting down in April; for context, the shooter released in July 2020.
