The development team at Ubisoft Barcelona has launched a major strike. The protests are triggered by significant layoffs that began immediately after the successful release of the Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced remake. The layoffs affected 51 employees of the Spanish branch, and in a show of solidarity and to protect their rights, the rest of the studio's staff joined them.
The Spanish studio played a key role in the remake's development. The Barcelona team was responsible for creating several main quests, the Gibara game region, enemy and boss AI, as well as the underwater swimming mechanics.
Despite Black Flag Resynced delivering excellent results—with over 2 million copies sold in the first 24 hours alone—the company immediately began laying off the creators behind this success.
The layoffs in Barcelona are part of a larger cost-optimization effort by the French publisher, which will affect 380 employees in total. As part of this restructuring, the Ubisoft Belgrade studio is closing down completely, while the Ubisoft Winnipeg branch is suffering severe losses.
The driving force behind these moves is a challenging period for Ubisoft due to weak financial results from previous major releases, including Star Wars Outlaws and Skull and Bones.
Protests outside the studio building are taking place alongside the negotiation process. The workers' main demands are job preservation and fair severance pay:
- Low compensation: A union representative, in a comment to IGN, noted that the payouts proposed by the company are significantly below the minimum expected level and fall short of the amounts Ubisoft paid out during previous waves of layoffs at the same studio.
- Staff reallocation: Discussions are currently ongoing regarding the transfer of some specialists to support the Rainbow Six franchise. However, the team that worked on Assassin's Creed is subject to permanent layoffs.
The protest action is set to last until at least July 16. The union hints that the strike could become indefinite if the company's management does not compromise on the payout issue.
The situation has drawn serious criticism from the industry community, as the layoff of highly effective specialists occurs against the backdrop of the company's new strategy. Recently, Ubisoft, in partnership with Tencent, established a subsidiary called Vantage Studios to manage its major franchises (Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six, Far Cry).
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