Let’s Keep Talking About Ubisoft

Ubisoft has a lot going on at the moment, huh? We’re coming to the end of a console generation, which means every company in the games industry is scrambling to produce new content worthy of the next generation. With that worldwide plague causing just about every public event ever to be cancelled, companies have also had to scramble to find new ways to promote themselves and their material. It’s a crucial time in the world of games development and publishing, filled with turmoil and upheaval.

For them, it’s probably a good thing they have so much going on. If they weren’t able to wave the promises of a new Far Cry or Watch Dogs game in our faces, they would have a far harder time distracting their audiences from the ongoing abuse allegations. It’s already pretty difficult for them to dodge this issue, and here is my proposal: keep bringing it up. If you’re unfamiliar with what you should be talking about, it goes like this. On July 2nd, 2020, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot penned emails to the company discussing harassment and a reconfiguration of the company’s Editorial group. “The types of inappropriate behavior we have recently learned about cannot and will not be tolerated,” Guillemot wrote.

Those so-called inappropriate behaviors could be found detailed in numerous accounts across social media. They included stories from Ubisoft Toronto about Maxime Béland, one of the vice presidents of the Editorial department, choking a woman at a party. Accounts also detailed Béland remarking on the appearance of women, and staring at them. He resigned, following Guillemot’s announcement. Tommy François, another vice president, was placed on leave pending an investigation.

Since then, further departures have made waves. Serge Hascoët, chief creative officer. Among these departures were Yannis Mallat, head of Ubisoft Canada, Cécile Cornet, global head of human resources, and Ashraf Ismail, creative director of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Reasons for departures have been vague, not always clearly tied to the controversy. Instead reasons often cite things like personal issues, time for change, and misconduct.

Ubisoft chose to bury the news as much as it could ahead of Ubisoft Forward, its online stream and definitely-not-a-replacement-for-E3. They addressed it, sort of, in a Twitter post. It was vague, declaring the issues couldn’t be addressed in the pre-recorded event. Yet the allegations had been circulating for weeks by this point.

It was also not tagged with #UbiForward, their promotional hashtag for the event, ensuring that the majority of fans following that hashtag wouldn’t get a whiff of the scandal. By making their statement impossibly vague, passing readers wouldn’t find out what the issues actually were. By making it an image instead of a text comment, they also prevented it from being searchable on Twitter. The statement clocks in around 322 characters, meaning it could’ve fit in a Tweet with some effort. It doesn’t have so much as a caption that can be searched by.

Following the stream itself, much reporting was around the games showcased. Alternatively, coverage centered on the inability for viewers to log in and access a promised free copy of Watch Dogs 2. The buzz and excitement was out there, working as Ubisoft had intended and taking attention away from the allegations. This (of course) is absolutely not to disparage all reporters, many of them did mention the scandal. It’s more about the general feeling that fans, or casual gamers who don’t follow industry news, came away with.

Everything remains ongoing. Stone Chin, their PR director, was fired recently for failing “to uphold the company’s code of conduct”. Business Insider reported speaking with over a dozen present and former Ubisoft staff who claimed that they didn’t believe removing individuals would be able to change the widespread culture at the company. One former employee recounted harassment she received, including being asked for sex on a near daily-basis by a man working there. Chelsea O’Hara, a former Ubisoft Toronto employee, has written about her harassment on her website.

There’s so much being swept under the rug by Ubisoft that it’s getting real lumpy under there, you guys. Guillemot has been vague when it comes to taking responsibility. It’s not clear if he didn’t know what was happening or if he was in any way complicit when it came to the company culture. Neither option paints him in a good light. At best, he comes across incompetent, somehow unaware of entrenched misconduct happening at the company he runs.

Now, a statement of my own accountability. I’m new to games journalism, and my excitement about having a role in an industry that is important to me has made me kind of… gloss over talking about the gloomy parts of things. I want to review games. I want to write long, self-indulgent opinion pieces that my editors actually let other people read. So far, I’ve shied away from saying much meaningful about the human cost constantly present in this industry.

That’s not because I don’t care. There are parts of the industry that are simply rotten to the core. I’m avidly against the mistreatment of employees, be it through hostile environments, sexual abuse, or discrimination. I hate predatory monetization that only serves to exploit children and vulnerable players. I hate movements that seek to abuse game developers and silence critics, be they companies suppressing low-scoring reviews or gamers sending death threats.

Hating it isn’t good enough, though, is it? That’s not enough, not if I were to turn around and write opinion pieces that outwardly support companies accused of abusive crunch practices, which I have. I wrote a piece defending The Last Of Us Part II, and although it was largely about the bigotry present in the fans, I only briefly mentioned Naughty Dog’s own problems. We owe it to ourselves and to other people to not let conversations die out.

Before controversies and social movements became hashtags like Gamergate and Me Too, they were already being shouted about by all those affected. Now it’s 2020. The goal posts have moved, and key abusers have been exposed. I watch activists affect meaningful change every day through education, protest, and reporting. It’s not enough without more people behind them, more people asking questions. There needs to be more people holding these stories of abuse up even when it’s not relevant to a release date story, or a trailer, or a review.

I’m not trying to preach to you, constant reader. I think I’m preaching to myself and hoping that it resonates. There is no contradiction between being excited for a game and utterly appalled by the practices that made it. In fact, that’s the only way we can make informed purchases. Knowledge is power, and if a game looks wonderful but was made by awful people or under awful circumstances, is the game actually worth your time?

Taking things directly back to Ubisoft, with a question and an example: Is it important to play Watch Dogs: Legion on release, or wait to get it second hand? If you play it on release anyway, can you talk about the abuse when you talk about the game, to make the things inextricable as they should be? Of course, it’s not just about Ubisoft.

They’re in the spotlight right now, but they are one cog in a giant machine. It’s about Naughty Dog. It’s about Alec Holowka. It’s Activision Blizzard and EA. It’s about Bioware, and Mortal Kombat. It’s about every company and individual in this industry who enables abusers. It’s about journalists, too, who are prone to reporting on abuses in one article and then leaving any mention of that out of promotional articles.

It’s about complicity, enabling these practices to continue by not talking about it. The industry has a problem with sweeping things under the rug. Accused individuals are allowed to resign, instead of having their employment terminated. Victims and survivors have to pick up the pieces of their own lives in lieu of systems that should be buoying them up and listening to them.

Companies and individuals with unresolved abusive practices should be called out every single time they become the focus of conversation. If we let them bury these stories, let them go back to business as usual, we might as well be stood at the shallow grave with them. We might as well be handing them the shovel. It’s not good enough.