Ubisoft confirms more layoffs (45 people)
- Thread starter John Elden Ring
- Start date
Considering how big Ubisoft is and how bad they appear to be managed from the outside, I'm happy to be underwhelmed by the small number of layoffs. It's obviously isn't great for those who lost their jobs but I would have expected a significantly higher number.
I think Ubisoft would probably want to shed more employees like other publishers have done, but their whole pipeline set up is reliant on their enormous amount of employees to churn out these big open world games(AC/Far Cry/etc..) that need a lot of asset making. They're one of those publishers who do much much more in-house rather than outsourcing, hence their many support studios around the world.
I think their folly of trying to incubate a gazillion GaaS games might be over, so they might start doing better moving forward.
Obviously, it's a big TBD.
I had some drinks last week with some employees. I asked them about these layoffs and told me that knew about them but that apparently won't affect their studio (different ones than the mentioned in the article) and aren't worried.
Because as the HQ mentioned publicly, what they are doing to reduce headcount and related costs is -instead of firing a lot of people at the same time- to renew less people with temporary/freelance contracts, to replace less people who retires early/gets fired/leaves (there are nice compensation plans for these cases) or try to relocate in other Ubi studios people from some time that may be needed to be reduced. And all this made in a very long period of cost reduction, so there's no massive layoff a specific day.
They're around 19K employees spread in around 40 offices spread around dozens of countries. So 45 people is very little for their context.
Ubisoft is a bloated company in terms of manpower since decades ago for the revnue they produce. They know it, and know that it would be good for them to cut the fat further, but don't want to do it because they're fine with their status and because it's a company where the employees have more weight than usual in big decisions of the company.
As an example, as I remember 3 people of their board of directors were representatives of their workers. Or -even if there's the typical pyramid structure- it's pretty horizontal regarding people in the top making periodical AMA so everyone in the company can ask, suggest or discuss with them whatever they want but obviously politely and having the extra info and context of working there.
Being a giant company obviously there are opinions of all kinds inside, but also reasons of why they take each decision. Plus people who likes or dislike them or has different views. But often important decisions are taken after considering a ton of factual data and the opinion of many very experienced and successful people in that area.
To make games is very hard, to make huge ones even more and to make hits (like many of the games they release, even if you don't like them) even more. And well, nobody has a crystall ball to read the future and there's to gamdev equivalent of the Coca-Cola formula: what works today may be totally outdated in a handful years.
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Not very relevant because doesn't reflect when they issued more stocks, and specially in the context where they directly or indirectly control of the majority of the shares of the company.
The important graph is this one:
This other one is also important, and shows they did clean the house last year even if there's still more to do. This year with AC Mirage + AC Shadows + specially Star Wars should be even better than in 2023-24:
