Things are not going well for developers at Ubisoft. Only a month after reports broke that the staff at the company's "Beyond Good and Evil 2" studio was being pushed to the limit (opens in new tab), developers at Ubisoft Paris are now opening up about the prevalence of "morally and physically exhausting" work at the studio They are opening up about the following.

The Ubisoft Paris developers spoke anonymously to the NME (opens in new tab), mainly through a union called Solidaires Informatique. During daily meetings, some employees were explicitly encouraged to work overtime: ...... The message was clear: "Work overtime," an anonymous developer told NME."

Staff members claim that they were promised that the studio would hire more staff to ease the burden on developers, but "this promise was never kept." Meanwhile, an anonymous source who spoke directly to NME claims that staff were pressured to work overtime in "small meetings" and that staff "identified as shy" were specifically targeted by "overbearing" individuals at the company.

This situation, the developers claim, was not helped by the hesitation of Ubisoft's upper management. The developers recount an episode in which upper management decision makers were unable to decide on a production engine when there were only nine months left in the production of one of their projects. Similarly, the staff of "Just Dance 2023" said that they were instructed to completely change the game's engine with only 11 months to go before release, and despite the team being "swamped" with work and overtime, the idea from their bosses "had to be considered at all costs."

. [Ubisoft headquarters intended Just Dance 2023 to be a major live-service work that would be included in the Ubisoft catalog, but rejected the developers' "realistic roadmap" to do so. When the staff tried to have Just Dance pushed back to 2024, Ubisoft headquarters told them that Just Dance must be under the Christmas tree in 2022.

I contacted Ubisoft Paris for comment on these claims.

In recent months, we have had a rather grim picture of life at Ubisoft: in February, an "unprecedented" mass burnout at Ubisoft Montpellier reportedly led to an investigation by French authorities; in January, Ubisoft Paris employees went on strike after a particularly tone-deaf e-mail (open in new tab) from CEO Yves Guillemot suggesting that the responsibility for fixing the company lies with frontline employees, not high-level executives.

On the plus side, Ubisoft Paris staff told NME that the appointment of new managing director Marie-Sophie de Waubert is good for the studio and may turn things around in time. But they will want to do so ASAP, before the staff has had enough.