Remember when Ubisoft announced that Star Wars Outlaws would get a new creative director and that things would finally improve for the company?

Company executives made sure to kill that joyful feeling and lock in a grim conclusion to a nightmare year, announcing a major wave of layoffs expected to affect 277 employees.

According to Stephen Totilo of Game File, the victims this time around are the entirety of the Osaka studio, the San Francisco production studio, and part of the Sydney production team.

The news comes right after the announcement that its free-to-play hero shooter XDefiant would go the way of Concord.

XDefiant launched in May 2024. Despite a strong start, the game has struggled to meet the executives' expectations.

Rather than working on improving the game, Ubisoft reacted by stopping downloads and registrations effective immediately, putting a June 3, 2025 expiry date on the servers, and firing half of the team involved.

The news comes hardly a month after Ubisoft shocked the gaming industry by taking the axe to the Ubisoft Montpellier division that had worked on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

The first entry in the series in over a decade was the best-reviewed game on Metacritic upon its release and felt like a labor of love in ways few Ubisoft titles have in recent years.

Although most of the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team was scattered between other projects rather than fired, it shines a light on the dysfunctional approach to management that has plagued the company.

Yes, as a company operating in a capitalist economy, Ubisoft's ultimate goal is to turn a profit, but this is a sustained need rather than a short-term one.

Currently, Ubisoft's strategy is to immediately bin games that underperform ever-so-slightly to please shareholders with zero emotional or artistic stake.

While this kind of management works in the short term when you need to make a specific quarterly report look good, it alienates players who come to video games for the magic of it all.

The result? You guessed it, worse sales later, and by association, displeased shareholders.

Ubisoft got a taste of this earlier this year when a Slovakian hedge fund tried to soft-coup the leadership, and the company's owners seem to be considering jumping ship as well.

Today, the biggest losers are not shareholders, but the 277 employees who leave an established company that was supposed to be a functional entity, and are left in the most hostile job market the gaming industry has seen since its inception.

Posted: Dec 08, 2024 1:37 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/ubisoft-cuts-277-jobs-san-francisco-osaka-sydney/