Welcome back to another quick roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news!
Voice actor strike: The voice actor union SAG-AFTRA, whose strike against the major players in the video game industry has gone on for almost a year as studios refused to cooperate on AI provisions, announced last night that it has reached a tentative agreement with the big companies on contract terms. The signatories include the likes of Activision, Disney, Electronic Arts, and Take Two. The strike will technically continue pending ratification by the union members and government regulators.
SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike suspended at noon PT today. All SAG-AFTRA members are instructed to return to work on productions under the IMA, including work promoting or publicizing projects produced under the IMA. READ MORE: www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-vi…
Ubisoft: Remember the French trial for the former Ubisoft executives accused of sexual assault and harassment? It’s marching onward with witness testimony over the last week, and it’s… actually much worse than it sounded. As The Guardian chronicles,
“In four days of hearings, female former staff members variously described being tied to a chair, forced to do handstands, subjected to constant comments about sex and their bodies, having to endure sexist and homophobic jokes, drawings of penises being stuck to computers, a manager who farted in workers’ faces or scribbled on women with marker pens, gave unsolicited shoulder massages, played pornographic films in an open-plan office, and another executive who cracked a whip near people’s heads. The three men deny all charges.”
Would like off this ride now, please.
Embracer: Lars Wingefors is “transitioning” from CEO to executive chair of the board at Embracer Group after years of chaos at the helm. Game Developer bizarrely labels the company during his reign a “layoff and divestment powerhouse,” which is… kind of a weird phrase? Readers paying attention over the last few years will remember him as the Embracer CEO who dramatically overextended Embracer’s position in the game market by buying up dozens of game studios, only to botch a $2B agreement with the Saudis and then spend the last few years scrambling to recover, laying off workers, canceling games, shuttering studios, and selling off still more. Here in the MMORPG genre, the biggest casualty was PWE and Cryptic, as Embracer chose to effectively replace the American teams on Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, and Champions Online with overseas remote hires at the European Realm of the Mad God studio, leading to communication lapses as well as a sharp decline in the content pipeline – a tragic fate for MMOs that were powerhouses of their own until Embracer’s wild swings. Alas, Cryptic is also all but gone now too. But Wingefors still has a job, for reasons.
