Ubisoft Employees Stage Company-Wide Strike Today as Unions Declare "Enough is Enough"

Today, the offices of one of gaming's biggest publishers are unusually quiet. Ubisoft employees across France - and potentially beyond - have walked off the job as a three-day company-wide strike gets underway, with workers refusing to return until at least February 12.

Five French unions called for this action: the STJV, CFE-CGC, CGT, Printemps Écologique, and Solidaires Informatique. They've been coordinating with international counterparts too, pushing for this to be a globally unified response rather than a localised French dispute.

This isn't the first flare-up. Solidaires Informatique staged a half-day walkout outside Ubisoft's Paris HQ back on January 22, just one day after CEO Yves Guillemot dropped the restructuring bombshell on employees. That was the opening shot. This three-day strike is the full response.

What Actually Triggered This

On January 21, Guillemot announced what Ubisoft is calling a "major organisational, operational and portfolio reset." The plan involves six games cancelled and seven others delayed, as the publisher aims to cut costs and reset its long-term production strategy . Among the casualties: the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake, three brand new IPs, and a mobile game .

The company is also restructuring its operating model around five "Creative Houses," with the closed studios being Ubisoft Halifax and Ubisoft Stockholm, plus restructurings at Ubisoft Abu Dhabi, Ubisoft RedLynx, and Massive Entertainment . You can read more about the cancellation of Assassin's Creed League, which was part of this same sweeping clear-out.

Then, five days later on January 26, the other shoe dropped. Ubisoft announced a voluntary departure plan that will affect 200 people at the company's Paris headquarters . That's roughly one in five staff at that location.

Oh, and on top of all that? Every employee is being ordered back to the office five days a week, effective from April.

The kicker - and this is the part that really lit the fuse - is how employees found out. The STJV stated that Guillemot announced the end of remote work, studio closures, project cancellations, and the new cost-cutting plan at the same time as the press, with none of these changes having been discussed during the mandatory consultations with the works councils a few days earlier .

Employees learned about their own future from a press release. You can understand why people are furious.

What the Unions Are Actually Saying

The joint statement from all five unions pulls no punches. The unions described the five-day in-office mandate as being treated "like children who need to be supervised" and called for "real accountability from company executives, starting from the top," while declaring "WE are Ubisoft, and WE are shutting it down February 10th to 12th" .

The unions wrote that "the announced transformation claims to place games at the heart of its strategy, but without us, these games cannot exist" and accused leadership of pushing workers out through worsening conditions rather than taking financial responsibility for the layoffs directly.

STJV spokesperson Rutschlé was particularly direct. He said the goal is to show management "that we will not be bullied into submission and that we are willing to fight for better working conditions," adding that workers are "sick of seeing our work conditions be degraded to a point where working at Ubisoft will become untenable."

The unions also raised the point that Ubisoft Halifax, one of the studios now shuttered, was closed just weeks after its workers successfully voted to unionise. That timing has not gone unnoticed.

The Bigger Picture

The day after Guillemot's announcement, Ubisoft's stock plunged more than 30% at the opening of the Paris Stock Exchange, hitting its lowest level in over a decade, with the company's market value falling to €606 million, down from over €1.5 billion just a year ago .

The restructuring plan also includes a €200 million cost-cutting initiative over the next two years . Ubisoft frames all of this as necessary surgery to build a "sustainable organisation." Workers frame it as management failures being offloaded onto the people who actually make the games.

Both things can be true at once, in a way. The company is genuinely in financial trouble. Years of misfires - from the Skull and Bones debacle to XDefiant getting pulled after launch to Star Wars Outlaws underperforming - have compounded into a serious problem. But the way this restructuring has been handled, the lack of consultation, the secrecy, the return-to-office order dropped on people with remote work agreements already in place, that's a separate issue from the financial reality.

The unions hope that if enough people join the strike, Guillemot and his team will realise they cannot make games without their workforce . Whether significant international participation follows remains to be seen. French studios have much stronger union protections than most of Ubisoft's offices in North America and elsewhere, which makes cross-border solidarity harder to organise in practice.

Ubisoft is expected to share additional information about its restructuring on February 12, which is, notably, the final day of the strike. Whether that timing is a coincidence or a deliberate attempt to manage the narrative around the action is anyone's guess.