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Ubisoft asking all staff to return to office full-time to "boost the collective performance for AAA"

Kacho

Kacho

Gold Member
Ubisoft has announced that its new restructuring into Creative Houses will come with the intent to bring all staff back into the office five days a week, with an annual allowance of work-from-home days.

"We really want to strengthen onsite collaboration, the collective dynamic across teams," SVP of Studio Operations Marie Sophie de Waubert told GamesIndustry.biz. "We know that in-person collaboration and interactions are key enablers of efficiency, creativity, and collective success in this persistently selective market. It's one enabler among others, but it's really one we believe in."
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"It's an intention. We will, of course, discuss in due time with the different countries the modus operandi, and the flexibility linked to that evolution of our model," she said. "But the objective is really linked to the quality of our games and the quality of our creativity. And it's one enabler among others for the Creative Houses to reconnect with success and team engagement."

CFO Frederick Duguet confirmed the company "will of course discuss with the employees and their representatives and all the teams," but described the changes "really a matter of further boosting the collective performance for AAAs."

"As Marie Sophie said, collective dynamics, permanent knowledge sharing, solving problems together at a high velocity is critical in this world of AAA business. That's the purpose and the intention that we want to further share with the teams."
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Full-time return-to-office mandates remain a divisive topic, and are opposed by a number of gaming unions.
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www.gamesindustry.biz

Ubisoft asking all staff to return to office full-time to "boost the collective performance for AAA"

Change is "to enhance collective efficiency, to drive the dynamics, the creativity, the sense of belonging"
www.gamesindustry.biz www.gamesindustry.biz
 
WFH with lazy triggly-puffs not working out so well, eh?

Cbs What GIF by The Late Late Show with James Corden
 
If you and your tasks are properly managed by your supervisors you can be very productive in homeoffice. If not, you will play games or watch Netflix instead of doing work.

At least this is my experience.
 
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LOL.

What happened to all the WFH supporters saying avoiding slogging it to work commuting and wasting money on gas and buying lunch lead to great performance and products? I thought the idea was saving time and money lead to more refreshed and productive employees right away instead of draining away in office small talk and grid lock?
 
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I imagine it will be kinda what Techland was (or still is?) doing - either show up in the office (which they know will be impossible to some people) or voluntarily resign so we won't have to be accused of mass layoffs.
 
WFH never made much sense for game development, even just for the sheer size of the assets they need to push around. Games are also far more complicated than what the average developer sitting at home making merge requests to some API project is doing.
 
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xrnzaaas said:
I imagine it will be kinda what Techland was (or still is?) doing - either show up in the office (which they know will be impossible to some people) or voluntarily resign so we won't have to be accused of mass layoffs.
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Basically lol.

They're still going to have mass lay offs but at least they can ease their own pain a little
 
IntentionalPun said:
WFH never made much sense for game development, even just for the sheer size of the assets they need to push around. Games are also far more complicated than what the average developer sitting at home making merge requests to some API project is doing.
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What probably happened was there were good intentions.

Game and tech studios seem like a party half the time the way they look and act. So a bunch of people who want to work were sick of sitting beside whiney manchildren and getting hit with ping pong balls trying to work.

So if they could do work at home without distractions and plow through their job going on MS Teams calls to do group work it makes sense if everyone is productive at the same working hours.

But what happened is half the people fuck around, do their work at odd hours, and jump on conference calls not contributing or even going on cam. So the guy could be washing his dishes. You can always tell who is fucking around on conf calls when they dont go on cam and when someone asks a question to them, there's a big delay and they scramble to unmute themselves like they are rushing back to their seat out of breath. Unmuting a button takes 2 seconds. Not 10 seconds.

The best time was when a bunch of us were on call and it sounded like some retard was vacuuming his rug.
 
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Labadal said:
Having to go to your actual workplace. Oh no, the horror!
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Trogdor1123 said:
The push back people have on back to work is crazy. Even moving to a single day makes people act like it's the apocalypse
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Before WFH ramped up for a lot of office workers before covid, it seemed like every person figured out how to wake up and get to work.

Covid crackdown loosens up, companies want things back to normal and somehow it's now impossible to figure out how to wake up and commute like before. Crazy laziness.

Funny how every other person who doesnt have a desk job can still figure out how to keep going to work like normal.
 
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StreetsofBeige said:
Before WFH ramped up for a lot of office workers before covid, it seemed like every person figured out how to wake up and get to work.

Covid crackdown loosens up, companies want things back to normal and somehow it's now impossible to figure out how to wake up and commute like before. Crazy laziness.

Funny how every other person who doesnt have a desk job can still figure out how to keep going to work like normal.
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It's true, and then they want compensation for how they are "impacted".
 
Magic Carpet said:
Come back to office is Musk speak for your going to be firing people, lets see who leaves first on their own.
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This. If WFH doesn't work for your office-based enterprise, you should be firing your middle management, not people actually doing the work. You lack processes, not motivation.
 
Trogdor1123 said:
It's true, and then they want compensation for how they are "impacted".
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Another stupid thing. If anything the company should scrape back salary.

Every day a person can WFH is cost savings for that person on food, transportation costs, and even something as simple as spending less money on new clothes.

When I WFH for two years straight during covid, I estimated I saved about $4-5k per year in gas and buying lunch. I literally saved $8-10k and that doesnt even include whatever car depreciation savings were. Probably tack on another couple grand saving on km.

If anything, it was a cost savings blessing I pocketed. Yet WFH lovers want that forever.
 
StreetsofBeige said:
What probably happened was there were good intentions.

Game and tech studios seem like a party half the time the way they look and act. So a bunch of people who want to work were sick of sitting beside whiney manchildren and getting hit with ping pong balls trying to work.

So if they could do work at home without distractions and plow through their job going on MS Teams calls to do group work it makes sense if everyone is productive at the same working hours.

But what happened is half the people fuck around, do their work at odd hours, and jump on conference calls not contributing or even going on cam. So the guy could be washing his dishes. You can always tell who is fucking around on conf calls when they dont go on cam and when someone asks a question to them, there's a big delay and they scramble to unmute themselves like they are rushing back to their seat out of breath. Unmuting a button takes 2 seconds. Not 10 seconds.

The best time was when a bunch of us were on call and it sounded like some retard was vacuuming his rug.
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We had that at first, then it turned into Teams on a cellphone (showing available or busy) and staff complaints roll in their leadership are non-responive to requests. All the while their leaders post hiking, dining, etc. Pics to social media during work hours. You let the little things slide, eventually they get really bold. And as always, the pendulum always swings back further as a reaction.
 
They lost a bunch of competent developers to go indie and develop one of the best RPGs of the decade.
Their AAA franchise bombed hard last year.
Their stocks crashed on the market
They sold most of their IPs to tencent.
They cancelled 6 projects.

And then they demand from their employees to stop working from home.

All of that happened within the last 6 lonths. At this point I genuinely think Ubisofts just trolling in their last days in business.

If I didn't know that Ubisoft is french, now I would know, judging by their bad taste of humor.
 
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StreetsofBeige said:
Another stupid thing. If anything the company should scrape back salary.

Every day a person can WFH is cost savings for that person on food, transportation costs, and even something as simple as spending less money on new clothes.

When I WFH for two years straight during covid, I estimated I saved about $4-5k per year in gas and buying lunch. I literally saved $8-10k and that doesnt even include whatever car depreciation savings were. Probably tack on another couple grand saving on km.

If anything, it was a cost savings blessing I pocketed. Yet WFH lovers want that forever.
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I've been doing WFH 90% of the time since the early 2000s, even in jobs where that was frowned upon... I just did it.

It's tolerated because I do my sh*t, I've seen others get in trouble (before covid) for the same behavior.

It really depends too, what I do requires some level of collaboration, but I work mainly alone and in my specific case face to face doesn't make much of a difference, also, I negled how I dress even when I go in the office.
 
I'm confused, shouldn't they operate just fine from home? Isn't most of Ubisoft's work just processing microtransactions?
 
^ For those of you talking bike and snow, who the hell rides their bike in bad weather?

Toronto went on a binge of bike lanes too. Got so bad and overdone, they reversed it. Way back, Jarvis St downtown (a very busy north/south road) was converted from a 5 lane road (2/3 lanes each way switchable pending time of day as the middle lane is customizable with a light) to have bike lanes.

It was such a shit show, the city converted it back after a couple years.

What they should had done is what other people said from the start. If you want to go ape shit adding bike lanes, do it on quieter adjacent streets. Not a busy one.
 
The root cause of RTO is a terrible, TERRIBLE middle management layer.

If anything, WFH has made painfully obvious how insanely bad and useless middle management is.
 
SJRB said:
The root cause of RTO is a terrible, TERRIBLE middle management layer.

If anything, WFH has made painfully obvious how insanely bad and useless middle management is.
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Games at large basically turned into 7+ year development cycles overnight with WFH policies, that was absolutely not a coincidence or a fault of middle managers. You can't pay people $100's of thousands of dollars a year in pay/benefits to roll out of bed and noon and pretend to work on computer for an hour. Literally everyone with a single functioning brain cell understands that is absolutely what tons of these people are doing, hidden in their 10,000 person teams. And it's not just 1 or 2 of them, or even a dozen--it's 30%, 45%, 60% of them.
 
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Haint said:
Games at large basically turned into 7+ year development cycles overnight with WFH policies, that was absolutely not a coincidence or a fault of middle managers. You can't pay people $100's of thousands of dollars a year in pay/benefits to roll out of bed and noon and pretend to work on computer for an hour. Literally everyone with a single functioning brain cell understands that is absolutely what tons of these people are doing, hidden in their 10,000 person teams. That very likely describes several thousand of them, if not even a super majority of them, it's not 1 or 2, or even a dozen.
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You sound like a middle manager.
 
StreetsofBeige said:
LOL.

What happened to all the WFH supporters saying avoiding slogging it to work commuting and wasting money on gas and buying lunch lead to great performance and products? I thought the idea was saving time and money lead to more refreshed and productive employees right away instead of draining away in office small talk and grid lock?
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It does. All of that is still true. But any company will fail if it has bad leadership. A boost in worker morale and productivity isn't a magical cure-all.
 
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