RTOs are most often a “one free layoff”-card that businesses play, so firing someone for criticizing it is very much in line with the underlying intent of the policy.
yeah, that’ll make him show up to the office!
It’s big brain moves like this that’ll surely return the like … 20x? … value they’ve lost over the last few years.
I’m sure the publicity of it I’ll land this guy a higher paying job anyways
I get the impression Ubisoft wants to lay off as many people as possible anyway. They don‘t care who so as long as they can meet some quota. I’m guessing they‘re trying to push operating costs down while they‘re looking for buyers of their IPs.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
I am so thankful that the executives took a productivity and happiness survey when we went full time remote.
Any time a new manager brings up maybe we should return to the office, our offcial remote manual begins with data: we are far more productive remote working. There is the data, the proof.
The second part about being overall happier reminds us that we didn’t really like being in the office either.
We also have two more metrics: amount of time saved by a company in commute reduction, and the increase in safety.
But the first two are the most important.
I have to wonder what the end goal here is for Ubisoft. you got people leaving in droves, people leaving and forming their own studios and producing games that are quite literally games of the year, and they’re axing people left right and center.
And lets not kid ourselves this company is essentially the cockroach of gaming, how it’s still alive in 2026 is in it’s own right quite the achievement. I can’t even recall the last good Ubisoft game I played.
Management have over inflated egos. They think, oh, fuck John, John’s division only did $25m. They only see bottom lines. But they fail to realize they killed off John’s ideas that would have brought in $500m. So John leaves, gets to develop his own ideas, then shocked peakachu face.
The goal of companies mandating RTO is attrition. They want people to quit without firing or laying them off.
Their goal is to hire younger, hungrier (both literally and figuratively) coders who are cheaper and less experienced and will use “AI” to clean up their code.
And as the market moves the jobs away from the sort of low paying work those hungry coders end up flipping burgers or driving uber instead. The wages and expectations at the places like ubisoft make for only the very worst/desperate of devs apply. Its happening all over the tech industry, you make more doing almost anything else.
I believe they want to divert all their resources into one huge Fortnite like success story. Something that can bring them a reliable recurring revenue stream.
All they have to do is make the best game of the year. Yet they have a severe case of skill issue
The strategy is to milk the zombie brand until there’s not a drop left.
Last Ubisoft game I purchased was Rainbow Six Vegas. Great game, but nothing else after that has interested me.
Is there a company that’s trying to destroy itself as much as Ubisoft? The CEO and board that’s running this company are genuinely some of the dumbest motherfuckers in the world. These idiots are still dedicating significant resources to make NFT games, they’re still trying to insist that microtransactions are fun, they refuse to do anything to make their games more enjoyable to players, and they’re trying everything in their power to squeeze out their talent. At this point, Ubisoft deserves to collapse.
They released one game last year that I’d expect to make money (Assassin’s Creed 14).
Not sure how they’re actually in business right now. Surely they need more than that to stay afloat. None of their microtransaction games are whale milking machines like EA’s FIFA/Madden or Activision’s COD series.
I’ll kind of miss them when they’re gone. They’ve always been the least evil of the big publishers.
Ubisoft is one of the least evil? I guess to a point, but I’d argue they haven’t made a truly great game in about a decade.
No real loss in my opinion.
Assassin’s Creed 14
What the fuck there’s 14 Assassin’s Creed games? Surely they’re gonna run out of historical periods soon. It’s only a matter of time before the announce Assassin’s Creed: Unga Bunga where you just sneak around the forest as a cave man
They got a cash injection from their parent company
I’ve been waiting for Ubisoft’s collapse for years now. Unfortunately, the consumer has proved me wrong time and time again.
And yet there are still a lot of players who buy their games lol.
He didn’t even insult them, how is this legal?
Ameeerica
He was attached to Ubi’s office Montreal, QC, Canada.
If there isn’t anything more than what is mentioned in the article, it’s highly that the CDPDJ would rule against Ubi if the dismissal is challenged; this would likely be protected as Freedom of Expression, as nothing negative was said about Ubi besides the implication that Ubi thought that their employees wouldn’t see their motives.Curious: Does Montreal allow “employment at will” like most states in the US do? If it does, I can’t imagine an UbiSoft contract not including it. The article definitely makes it sound like a termination for cause, but what’s written on his termination paperwork may be entirely different.
QC has stronger protections than neighboring ON does, actually. If the employee has more than 2 years of service they simply cannot be dismissed without just cause. Even under 2 years there are a bunch of protections, but at 2+ it gets harder.
Yeah, that kind of worker protection pretty much died in 'murica 25+ years ago.
deleted by creator
bad-companies.md:Ubisoft
2026:
- fires team lead after return-to-office critique
- closes Halifax studio 1 month after Union formed
2025:
- full-in on gen-AI after shares plummeting
- NOYB sues because of covert user tracking
- Ubisoft wants to monitor your RAM (🏴☠️)
- EULA demands deleting delisted games
2024:
- deletes inactive customer accounts with purchased games
- “Gamers need to get comfortable not owning games”
- adds Denuvo after reviews were made
2023:
- ads in games
- started that list here
To be fair, they also want to be bought up (rebranding), after multiple buy-outs and mass-layoffs.
For things before 2023, there was sexual harassment (multiple) bullying and hostile workplace and their excitement over NFT. They had a boys club and made it a really toxic atmosphere, where the CCO literally said “Women don’t sell”.
I feel like this file would be valuable for every company we might purchase from, and also nearly impossible to maintain.
If only instead of each one micromanaging our purchases there could be a system set up to thwart the bad corporate behavior in a broad and systemic way, with the dedicated pros doing oversight professionally.
That’s ridiculous. It would take some sort of centralized entity designed to represent the will of the populace. I wouldn’t even know where to start to create such a thing.
The website that pulls this off would get the $2.75 I keep not giving Wikipedia.
I stopped buying Unisoft games decades ago. Because they suck. The owners suck. The management sucks. The corporate culture sucks. I feel bad for the coders working for them.
Stop. Buying. Ubisoft. Games.
I tried to uninstall a game but was blocked because I didn’t remember my ubisoft launcher password. Wtf, its my PC get the fuck out
Probably wanna check
BulkCrapUninstaller for windows. https://www.bcuninstaller.com/
It’s pretty good.
Or just drop Winblows and finally move to freedom by installing a good Linux distro.
A Linux native version might even be worse. At least in windows you can usually just delete the directory out of \program files or wherever. Linux applications tend to insert themselves into every corner of your filesystem
Revo Uninstaller is really good too.
Or as someone else mentioned, just ditch windows. It’s a sinking ship. I’ll end my spiel there.irunarchbtw
very nice, thanks for the link.
The last Ubisoft games I played to the end were AC: Black Flag and Watch Dogs, which were both like 12-13 years ago. Neither game was GOOD, but they seemed decent to me at the time. I’ve play tested a few titles since then since then, all of which were hot garbage. Ubisoft is as dead to me as EA these days.
siege was pretty cool for the first two years
Ubislop. I stopped buying them after AC2.
You just sail the high seas and never pay a single cent.
And you should! But most of them still aren’t worth the download.
Okay. I’m keeping my commitment, but I’m going to need help.
Everytime Ubisoft makes the news for being idiots, I buy another Indie game.
I’m going to need your recommendations for great indie games.
Because Ubisoft has recently gotten me through my wishlist.
-
Cassette Beasts
-
Pseudoregalia
-
Return of the Obra Dinn
-
Chants of Sennar
-
Gloomwood
I think the formatting is a markdown thing… try using double line breaks if you edit or just next time
…what kind of game is that?!
In case you haven’t deciphered where the cut off points are:
- Cassette Beasts
- Pseudoregalia
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Chants of Sennar
- Gloomwood
Yeah, I was just poking at what I assumed was a day off the cuff response. Didn’t occur to me they might have tried formatting it, and failed.
Thanks for breaking them out!
There’s like 4 games without separation in there
Commas are a premium feature now.
Microtransaction based single purchase
My client shows the returns I added to it… oh well, maybe Lemmy requires carriage returns ;)
Updated my post after a long day at work! :) sorry y’all
Lemmy works like Reddit formatting where you hit Enter twice for a new line (or put 2 spaces at the end).
+1 to Cassette Beasts
Psuedoregalia I think has some of the best movement in any game. I was sad for it to be over, I needed more. I love games that leave room for “breaking” the intended path if you can find the right places to push the movement tech to its limits. Not many games do it.
Gloomwood is great. It feels a lot like classic Thief in the best of ways.
Thank you!
-
Pulled from my Top Playtime on Steam (so you know you’ll get your money’s worth if you like them!)
- Factorio (Even though the DLC is pricey, it at least doubles the playtime. Though, like RW below, it takes a lot of content/concepts from fan-made mods.)
- RimWorld (Though I dislike how many DLCs they’re pumping out and how much is basically taken from mods.)
- Terraria
- Mount & Blade (Warband 1 & 2 are prime)
- Kerbal Space Program (NOT the sequel)
- TerraTech (The original is a better experience)
- Both the Pathfinder games
- Grim Dawn
- The Riftbreaker
- UnderRail
- Mindustry (Open source/free, but deserves the support from buying it on Steam.)
- No Man’s Sky (They’ve gone above and beyond in shaping up since the clusterf release.)
- The Long Dark
- Rise to Ruins
- Space Pirates and Zombies (1 and 2 are both great, in their own ways.)
- Caves of Qud
- Tales of Maj’Eyal
- STALKER (I’ve heard bad things about #2, but the rest are great, high replayability with Anomaly.)
- Astroneer
- War for the Overworld
- Autonauts (and Autonauts vs Piratebots!)
I’d like to add Satisfactory to this list.
STALKER 2 is generally fine today, I’m having a blast with it. Of course there are things that need fixing (e.g. telekinetic enemy throwing objects at you through walls seems to be the most egregious), but nothing game breaking afaik.
Lets be real here… Factorio probably has more time played than all the others combined right? lol
All combined? No. Top in playtime by a very large margin over #2? You betcha! 😁
Amazing. Thank you!
The Riftbreaker is fun and graphcally nice to look at. For city builders, I’d also like to suggest:
- Manor Lords
- Timberborn
Monster Train 2 if you like card games. It’s got a load of content and replay and they recently released a patch today to add more!
Oh, good call. I loved the first Monster Train. Thank you for the recommendation!
Here are my recommendations then:
CrossCode is a personal favorite of mine. An action RPG heavily inspired by retro games.
Library of Ruina is a great non-roguelike deckbuilder. Technically it’s a sequel, but it’s not necessary to know anything about Lobotomy Corporation to get the full enjoyment of its story. At most you can just look up LC’s true ending if you aren’t interested in brutally hard management sims.
Tactical Breach Wizards is a really intertesting mix between a turn-based tactical game and a puzzle game.
Thanks!
The Last Caretaker and StarRupture are pretty fun if you like the factory survival type game. TLC is something really special IMO. The boat aspect is just so much fun.
Thank you!
TLC is so good
Sayonara Wild Hearts if you want a short but very cool musical game
Thanks!
Zero Sievert - single player extraction shooter and you can customize the difficulty with granular controls
Brotato
Thanks!
Little Rocket Lab is like Stardew + Factorio. It’s chill and fun.
signalis if you haven’t got it
Thanks!
Terra Invicta is amazing. It’s as if Paradox made an X-Com grand strategy game. The developers were clearly passionate about their game.
Thanks!
Monster Train 2
It may not be the best of all time, but I remember Celeste has been a blast to play, and it’s really well polished
Bloodthief is great, fast paced with an extremely high skill ceiling. Unlockables give you something to strive for and the level based structure makes it easy to quickly pick up and put down. Some other games I see people recommended here that I love are Signalis, Pseudoregalia, and Sayonara Wild Hearts.
Signalis is the best modern take on the old Resident Evil formula I’ve ever played, hands down. Pseudoregalia is a blast to play, the movement and tech in that game are unrivaled. I thought about comparing it to some Mario games, but that wouldn’t do it justice. Sayonara Wild Hearts is short but beautiful, there is nothing out there like it and it probably has some deeper meaning to read into.
Thank you!
No problem. If you try any of these, keep me in mind and let me know what you think.
Senua’s Sacrifice
Thanks!
Lethal Company is a fantastic game imo.
Thanks!
Derail Valley Simulator and Vintage Story have gotten me through the last year or so.
Thank you!
I mean, it’s not hard to understand why their stock is down 95% over the last 5 years…
We need socialism
Cooperatives and unions are the future!
Then you have to fight for it.
Ubisoft, they are still alive. Wow. Well not much longer we can hope.
Is this sort of thing not protected by labour laws?
Sadly not everywhere.
Not anywhere in America.
I’m pretty sure France is one of those places where it is indeed.
I’m pretty sure Montreal is one of those places not in France indeed.
Ah, my bad. Didn’t realize this is Ubisoft Montreal specifically.
This is why I’m so happy I’m 3000 miles away from my office. No way I’m getting a call back to office. Never was and never will be.
The company I worked for (late stage startup) was bought by a giant mega corp, which has an office nearby. Literally my first month there and they announced a return to office policy.
We technically have a space in a city by me. But it’s like 12 random desks and some video conferences rooms. No way we could actually go back to the office. That sucks for you guys tho. My old man lost his long time remote role and is back on the road again every day.
I think people at Ubisoft should just quit and start their own competing game studio.
If this type of leading results to profits then almost any does.
Blackjack and hookers is more Obsidian’s thing.
With what money? If you haven’t been paying any attention, there’s almost zero investor interest post-COVID contraction in gaming unless its massive controlling buyouts. The little there is requires sacrificing yourself on the altar of gen AI. No one working in games has enough money to self-fund the initial funds for a studio unless they have rich parents (Sandfall) or are one of the problem executives.
