Ubisoft Employees Launch Petition for Improved Working Conditions

The Ubisoft employee group A Better Ubisoft has launched a petition seeking public support for reforms at Ubisoft after senior management at the company failed to meet its demands.

Ubisoft began its public reckoning for its toxic work culture and sexual misconduct last summer, when employees the company over spoke up about working conditions at the gaming giant. Despite efforts to root out toxic elements in the company, including chief creative officer Serge Hascoët, Ubisoft employees say the company has not gone far enough.

More than 1,000 current and former Ubisoft employees signed an open letter in July 2021 calling out the company for failing to go far enough. A Better Ubisoft laid out the following specific demands for senior management:

• Stop promoting, and moving known offenders from studio to studio, team to team with no repercussions. This cycle needs to end.
• We want a collective seat at the table, to have a meaningful say in how Ubisoft as a company moves forward from here.
• Cross-industry collaboration, to agree to a set of ground rules and processes that all studios should can use to handle these offences in the future.
• This collaboration must heavily involve employees in non-management positions and union representatives.

As a similar reckoning plays out at Activision Blizzard, A Better Ubisoft has compared that company's reaction to its own and found more cause for concern.

"In just 3 months it seems that they have listened to the concerns of employees and acted on them," wrote the A Better Ubisoft Twitter account. "While our demands are not identical, many overlap and could be addressed through similar actions just as swiftly." The employee group explicitly decried Ubisoft's lack of transparency about the process before introducing this new petition.

"100 days ago we signed our open letter and set out our four key demands," the group wrote on Twitter. "None of our demands have been met. So today we're launching a new petition, open for ALL our supporters to sign."

Ubisoft has yet to respond to the employee group's latest efforts.