Quitting Rate for the Past 18 Months Have Been Staggering
Ubisoft is currently undergoing something that is called the “Great Exodus”. For the past eighteen months, employees quitting Ubisoft have been at a staggering high, only beaten by Activision Blizzard by sheer number percentages.
For while there have been many people resigning from their current postings due to you know what, the numbers and the figures that have been leaving the Assassin’s Creed creators have been remarkable.
According to a report made by Axios, Ubisoft has been having a high attrition rate, at 12% per year. The only one that’s beaten those numbers has been Activision Blizzard at 16%, and we already have a general idea as to why.
For Ubisoft, it’s just as nuanced, though there have been a lot fewer lawsuits from the government involved. There’s the fact that Ubisoft wants to get into NFTs (even if they have no idea themselves how it works), the pay raise they’ve given their Canadian employees over their other studios, Ubisoft mishandling of workplace misconduct scandal, not to mention better pay and work environments from other video game competitors.
One former employee from the Pairs division even said about her departure: “There’s something about management and creative scraping by with the bare minimum that really turned me away.”
Little wonder then that employees are leaving. But what’s also interesting is what positions that some of these former employees had. Some of the top-name talents- five out of the twenty-five that were part of Far Cry 6 have already left. It’s not just the Far Cry team either. 12 of the 50 top names of 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla have left too.
It’s little wonder then that projects have slowed or even stalled when some of the big decision-makers and creators have left the company. In fact, one developer remarked that a colleague currently at Ubisoft contacted them, needing help to solve a game issue. That was because no one else there knew the system anymore.
Ubisoft Management is trying to put a bright face on it though. According to Anika Grant, head of people ops, everything is fine. “Our attrition today is a few percentage points above where it typically is,” Grant said to Axios. “But it’s still within industry norms.”
If having that much turnover is considered normal, is that a good thing? It doesn’t seem that way, especially when in Montreal, there are only 60 odd employees left. Or when the next lowest is at 9% for EA, of all places.
A current Ubisoft employee had this to say on the matter of other employees leaving. “I think abuse and toxicity are contributing factors but not deciding ones for most,” they said. They then added, “Women and people of color experience them as deciding factors.”
Indeed.