Last year, severe allegations of workplace misconduct and harassment at Ubisoft forced top executives to leave and the company to face severe scrutiny. Over a year later, despite changes and public claims to be improving, employees still feel that harassment cases aren't being addressed.
In a report published by Kotaku, an Asian employee going by the pseudonym of Valerie describes her experiences at Ubisoft Montreal, home to franchises such as Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. During her time working there from 2018-2021, she faced multiple cases of sexual harassment, abusive behavior, and racist remarks. She tried multiple times to report this misconduct to HR, Relais Expert Conseil (an outside firm brought in last year to review employee complaints,) and CEO Yves Guillemot in her resignation email, but her reports were generally ignored or, in the case of the technical director of an unannounced and canceled project, told that it didn't constitute sexual harassment because it was limited to three incidents.
But Valerie isn't the only employee to have faced these issues. One former developer who tried reporting their experiences through various reporting tools was often told their complaints would be investigated and brought up the chain of command. However, they never got any updates about the report's outcome, likening the experience to the dystopian bureaucracy of Papers, Please. "It’s sad, and if it’s an intentional way of burying this stuff, it’s working," they told Kotaku.
Despite Guillemot's claims that "considerable progress has been made," there are doubts among the staff that this is true. Worker representatives of the French offices' Social and Economic Committee (every company of a certain size in France has one) have been denied the opportunity to be involved in monitoring complaints and how they're handled. Even with a looming lawsuit from French union Solidaires Informatique, cases of employee harassment continue to be ignored.
