The French video game workers union STJV (Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo) is organizing a strike in three French studios from Ubisoft. The STJV called the strike earlier this month, following the failure of the annual salary negotiations at Ubisoft.
“Despite the union's efforts to find an acceptable compromise, negotiations have stalled,” the union said in its statement. “To meet arbitrary cost reduction targets, management offered a budget dedicated to what increases would be lower than inflation for the second consecutive year“.
The union also pointed to Ubisoft's financial report for the first half of fiscal year 24, during which CEO Yves Guillemot said results were “well above expectations.” In the company's latest report, covering the nine months to December 2023, Guillemot spoke of “positive momentum”, with revenue down 4.1% compared to the previous year and net bookings up 1.6 %.
Games are created by developers
Representatives of the unions working at Ubisoft spoke to the French publication Gamekult to shed some light on the strike, with a Ubisoft Paris worker explaining: “The strategy chosen by the management aims to save 200 million euros in the next two years on production costs. We contest this strategy.”
“When you are a game development studio, the right way to make money is to produce video games in best possible conditions so that they can be of the right quality. It is not by skimping on the workers who build them, or by saving on the tools they use, that money will be made in a capitalist context. Workers want to be proud of what they post. And in general it is not by struggling to pay the rent or working in precarious conditions that one can work well.”
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