cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/36712639
Ubisoft’s first North American union, located at their Halifax, Nova Scotia studio, was certified on December 18th, 2025. Now, not even a full 30 days later, Ubisoft Halifax is closing.
It’s so easy to not buy games. When was the last good game they made? I guess I’ll continue to ignore their catalog.
The open corruption and lack of empathy for the working class is just embarrassing. I hate EVERY company now since they only care about shares. They don’t even consider us as human, we are simply just tools for them and can be thrown away at any moment.
Jesus fucking christ so blatantly evil
Solvent corporations shouldn’t be legally allowed to dissolve positions.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Ubisoft just continues to be awful.
Now all Canada needs to do is legalize piracy on Ubisoft products.
so you are saying we can end ubisoft by simply unionizing?
Eh, we are already unionized in France. The difference is we have laws protecting workers so they can’t just shut a studio down willy nilly.
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As far as I’m concerned, unionization should be government mandated for every company everywhere in every industry.
But unfortunately we live in hell.
That’s the way it works in France (and other EU countries, I assume?). We literally have to have a workers reprensative council past a certain number of employees.
As a Canadian living north of the nut-hatch, I wish I had the money to excercise my dual citizenship and get out of here to Portugal, or anywhere else in the EU.
Absolutely this. We need mandated unions for every single company that exists. And with loopholes closed, like offshoring/outsourcing, corporate “headquarters” is a closet in Delaware, etc.
I get where you’re coming from but unions should not be mandated, they need to be formed for the actual workers that want things to change for the better. Just look at Sweden for a good example of how to implement unions at almost all workspaces without the need for the state to be involved.
Look at Belgium for a good example of how they are mandated.
So how do they do it?
With stronger union protections, necessary unions will form organically.
By not getting the state involved at all. All negotiations happens between the workers and the companies with about 88% of workers in Sweden having a collective agreement. All workers also have the right legally to join or start a union and unionbusting is illegal. If the company doesn’t want a collective agreement it usually results in strikes such as the ongoing one against Tesla that has been going on since 2023.
But union busting being illegal is the state getting involved.
True, that we can agree on is necessary to not get into the same situation that happened here. What I’m saying is that it is not necessary for something to be mandatory for it to still be almost universal.
The pinkertons have entered the chat
Don’t worry, the America’s free market provides many paramilitary groups to shutdown those pesky unions and curious journalists. No need for government involvement!
My 10+ year long Ubisoft boycott still looking like a good idea.
indeed
I started to Boycott Ubisoft when they started online DRM checks for single player games that you could not play offline anymore. It was with the release of Assassins Creed 2 and I think it was Settler 7. That was about 16 years ago.
I started to boycott Ubisoft when I can’t think of a single game of theirs I would even want to play.
Eh, I haven’t boycott Ubisoft. But also, they don’t make good games so I haven’t bought any either. Might just make it official after this though.
Painful, but these companies need to fuck off then.
So apparently being a French or Canadian company doesn’t necessarily mean that you respect or understand unions, I thought that was mostly American practice, I was wrong
That’s because they all adapt to local workers laws. That’s how you know they would absolutely fuck us every which way if they could, hence why we (French people) need this sort of reminder.
Alas I doubt this would even show up in the news.French companies outside of France might as well be American with the way they treat non French workers.
Almost any large capitalist company, especially those that are publicly traded, will devour its own in the name of higher Q3 profits.
If the Canadian government were real it would exact punishing fines on the company’s Canadian held assets in response to this. And I don’t mean cost of business fees, I mean hurtful costs, because these giant fucking companies seriously damage Canadian lives when they just rugpull the labour after making massive profits of Canadian operations. There is no justifiable reason to side with Ubisoft or their scumsucking management here.
I completely agree. This isn’t so much a failure of business; it’s a failure of the government to properly hurt businesses that enact policies that hurt workers and consumers. And in democratic countries with voters, it’s also the failure of the voters.
This is why we need people like Lina Khan to be given much more power in society. There are good, liberal economists out there who understand that if you don’t regulate externalities, then market systems will cause extreme disfunction in society. Smart economists understand this, elite rich people understand it, the problem is that the bottom tier of society that is ignorant and believes in religious myths is easily deceived by the upper classes.
The result is a society with progressively more unequal wealth distribution, rapidly descending into environmental hell, with a public that is mostly confused, religious, and idioticly upset about market conditions, but glad the evil trans girl won’t be able to play softball.
All of these issues are part of the same problem: how do you convince the poor and stupid to not get tricked by the elite again? But perhaps it’s just impossible. After all, the poor are mostly religious and believe in crazy things like virgin births and flat earth… Until the poor reject such lunacy, or society becomes so awful that they are compelled to reject it, there’s really not much hope for change.
Genuinely, invest in education and you can resolve a lot of this in one fell swoop. I firmly believe that a large part of the reason the US is in its current state is because of the systematic cuts to our education system which have been happening for damn near half a century (fucking Reagan). Invest in the youth, give them the critical thinking and media literacy skills needed to draw their own conclusions, and I think you’ll have made significant progress on the issue.
Easier said than done, though, I’ll admit, and it’s a plan that operates on a pretty goddamn long timeline - a much longer one than the current critical situation is likely to allow us.
This is a great point. Specifically an increase in economic education required of students would be helpful, including helpful for things like understanding environmental science, because externalities and environmental science and regulation have overlap that most don’t understand.
“we’d rather amputate that entire source of revenue than pay workers fairly”
Capital would rather burn everything down than lose a penny to the working class. Yes in this example, highly paid developers are considered working class relative to billionaire owners
highly paid developers
You’re not familiar with the games industry are you?
Their wages are significantly lower than related software fields of similar skill sets.
Yeah, that’s another fun aspect of our culture. Jobs that many people actually want due to what they are passionate about lead to abuse.
It’s the reason I never seriously considered getting into game development or becoming a teacher.
I am the rare father involved in the PTO (parent-teacher organization) along with my wife at our kid’s elementary school. We were handing out basic cheap supplies to the teachers last month as a Christmas thing. We’d interrupt the class to give the teacher a SINGLE roll of paper towels and then a small box of tissues or some glue sticks or whatever, and they were excited and grateful every time!
If your income comes mainly from your work, you’re Working Class (even if you own you own business), if your income comes mainly from the money made by the money you have (in assets or even “investments”) you’re Owner Class.
Certainly, modern politics only ever divides people in those two classes, with mainstream parties generaly only working for the good of the Owner Class which is how you end up with falling salaries in real terms and growing Asset valuations in the form of bubbles on all kinds of assets, most notably stocks and realestate (notice how most mainstream politicians see the rising of both stockmarkets and house prices - tough of late, they don’t say it about the latter quite as openly - as being good things).
The single greatest scam of modern Neoliberal Capitalism was making people who own their means of production - sometimes only partially or not really because they’re in debt for it - but still have to work for a living think they’re not Working Class and hence Neoliberal Capitalism is actually working for their benefit.
If there is one thing that around a decade working for the Finance Industry has taught me, is that almost all government policies are directed to help those who make money from having money make even more money, which is why, for example, plenty of countries have lower taxes on income from “investments” than on income from “work”, when the fair thing would be the other way around since the former is parasitical so lower taxes on it just induces more economic actors to engage in non-productive, extractive economic activities.
100%. I always ask people to look at their tax return. Does your money come from your labour/work, or from the things you own? If you aren’t living off of the things you own, then you are working class.
I mean I own stocks and stuff in index funds, so… AM I THE CAPITAL?? lol jk
Everybody who has to work for a living is part of the working class. Further division is just “divide et impera” by the owners.
Exactly right: a doctor who earns $500k/annum is working class where a landlord earning $50k/annum is capitalist class. The division between the two comes from whether or not the person sells their labour to generate income versus making money from capital assets without expending labour. It has nothing at all to do with the amount earned.
Now, the truth is that there are a fair few working capitalists - those who sell their labour, then use the proceeds of that sale to purchase capital to gain further income - but that’s where the waters get a bit more muddy. I am one of these people; I earn dual income from my job and from my investments. Many might consider me a class traitor, and there’s a fair amount of reason to that accusation, but I personally consider that I am just operating within the confines of the system I was unlucky enough to be born into. I’ll consistently vote for people who would take away my privilege to capital investments but, until they gain power, I’ll use the current system to my advantage.
I like to think that we’re all working class, and that to subdivide classes further benefits only the capital
Yes in reality, like 90% of people are working class, but I just wanted to make that designation for anyone reading it and going “software engineers aren’t working class”. I mean it in the more general working class vs capital owners.
Anyone who cannot stop working and live off their own wealth (and not rely on the working income of others) for the rest of their lives is, by definition, working class.
I agree, but I think there are enough people who conflate working class with blue collar that making the distinction is justified.
please be nice to the rich ‘working class’ They’re ‘just like you’!
They don’t live week by week, they have thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of disposable income per month.
No, I’m not going to treat them the same as my fellow lower classes.
That’s a mistake. If you treat them as your equal then you can make then see they aren’t special or “middle class” and then you have another pair of hands to help the working class.
That’s well natured but naive.
Richer ‘working class’ already do shit on the poorer classes, they already punch down with ferocity.
Higher wage working class is working class. If your income doesn’t come from owning things, if you put in work to get your income, you are working class. Division among ourselves only weakens us.
highly paid developers
Not in the games industry, lol
Just making the distinction that both blue and white collar workers are all still the working class generally. Colloquially, “working class” can be used more to mean blue collar workers, but in my context I mean anyone not in the capital ownership class.
Really? I always assumed they made more than developers in the “enterprise” world.
Everyone wants to work in games. Few want to work on accounting software and client messaging organization programs. Who do you think gets paid more despite doing basically the same thing?
Doing matrix operations in C++ is super annoying and difficult coompared to writing SQL queries wrapped in Java jdbc, or creating some REST APIs in python/ruby for some js react UI. Another comment response acknowledges this.
But I get that probably most people want to write games. Having the skills to do 3D graphics programming is another thing. (I remember this kid in my undergrad linear algebra class, who was complaining he failed the class like three times, and that he was going to go to the department head and get the professor fired lol. I think that guy wanted to do game programming. I’m betting he’s writing unit tests now.)
Noooo, not even close. There may be some senior devs in AAA studios making bank, but the vast majority of people doing the day-to-day art and development work on games typically get much worse pay and benefits than similar roles in other parts of the tech sphere.
A lot of people are very passionate about making games, and the games industry heavily exploits that passion to short change its workers. A lot of (mostly young) devs are willing to accept less pay to work on games because they feel like it will be more fulfilling than working on other mindless corporate crap, and those who do get jobs in the industry are afraid to ask for more money or try to unionize because they know there are a dozen equally passionate candidates waiting to replace them for less money if they make too many waves.
The result is that wages stay lower than other tech jobs and hours worked are much higher. With AI on the rise the problem will no doubt get even worse as execs use it as an excuse to shrink teams and “do more with less”.
Not to mention generally enterprise devs aren’t beholden to public launch dates set externally by publishers and therefore end up burning out really fast trying to make a deliverable happen. Not saying that doesn’t happen elsewhere in software, but it’s really common in the games industry
That’s interesting. Because writing code for 3D graphics is way more complicated than writing an SQL query or some input form UI. I assumed those devs are super skilled and hence paid accordingly.
On the flip side, errors in 3D graphics typically won’t cost a company millions, while errors in an SQL query very well might
It’s not by chance that for example the Investment Banking industry pays a lot more money to developers than the wider IT industry - a system breaking down for an hour or two there can cost millions because, for example, trader’s can’t actually trade certain assets.
Generally the more money that depends on their systems being functional without errors or interruptions, the more an industry is willing to pay for devs.
Those that write code for 3D graphics get paid a lot. That’s why most companies nowadays use middleware like UE5…
Generally the more money that depends on their systems being functional without errors or interruptions, the more an industry is willing to pay for devs.
However in addition to that there is also the supply-demand effect: in demand specialists for which there are few available experts get paid more than people doing the kind of work for which there are a lot more experiences professionals around.
3D graphics programmers would benefit from the second effect but generally not from the first.
As a comparison, for example Quants (who program complex mathematical models used in asset valuation software for complex assets such as derivatives) in Investment Banking in London - thus who gain from both effects - about a decade ago had salaries of around £300k per year as they’re both working on critical software elements in systems used for managing billions of dollars of assets and have a very rare expertise (they’re usually people with Mathematics or Physics Masters or Doctorates who are also developers and who also have quite a lot of specific knowledge of the business of investment banking, which all adds up to a very rare combination of skillsets)
Gaming industry relies on game devs being super passionate about it, so they can pay them less.
My game dev friends almost all got out of it because they weren’t paid well and had to crunch all the time.In corporate software you get paid well and just hate the work you do.
I’m moving from a “not bottom of the ladder but pretty damn low” test automation position to the game industry and I’m expecting to make half as much
Devs are working class
Because they actually work on products literally, they’re the base of their profession with pretty much nobody under them bar a few juniors if any
I fear the day when being a dev like me becomes so normal I make minimum wage and can’t afford anything anymore… It’s seriously terrifying to realize I worked and learned all this time and it may be for nothing in like 10 years…
lol that day is coming sooner than you’d think, I think 10 years is being generous tbh
You should learn a highly niche specialization within SWE if you don’t already have one (that’s what I have). That will be overtaken by AI too, but it’ll give you more runway at least.
Yea… I definitelly need to do that…
If I were in your shoes (and I am), I would start trying to blindly use AI to do various aspects of my job (and I have).
The results are laughable.
There are things that I do that AI can do. Stupid, boring, uninteresting things. In particular, AI excels at doing things I already wrote a simple Bash script to do for me a decade ago.
Seriously, I encourage everyone to give it a try.
Let’s all build that passion project we’ve been dreaming of and host it for the world to enjoy.
In the best case, the world has a happy little passion project chugging away being useful.
In the worst case, we learn what AI cannot do yet, and realize we can still keep charging people for our labor for a few more years (and decades and centuries).
To repurpose The Fermi Paradox, if AI allows anyone to easily make a useful product, then where are they all?
Is that The AI Fermi Paradox?
Oh yea I know that. I use it as well and it’s exactly as you said.
I can get the base of a feature laid out with it but it’s not going to finish it for me, ever
I mean, at least you always have those supple wrists to fall back on.
I hope more people do follow this advice, though. It’s always a joy to discover people’s little passion projects. They make life richer for the rest of us.
Currently working on an Ubi-style game set in Middle-Earth. Maybe my niece and I will be the only ones to enjoy it, but I’m ok with that.
it’s not even just about the money really. it’s just as much about control. you have to make an example of any uppity unionizing peasants right at the start, lest you end up with your entire corral of cubicle drones strutting around thinking they have some kind of say in any aspect of their work environment
how highly paid are we talking? I doubt they’re making 200k
keep in mind that Canadian tech sector wages are not on par with american - as a rough rule, just keep the dollar value and change the currency (i.e. 100k USD salary is 100k CAD salary)
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Capitalism will let us all eat shit and die and still cut that shit with the last of the Amazonian sawdust.
“we’d rather amputate that entire source of revenue than pay workers fairly”
Oh come now, Its not just about money.
Its about making sure frat boy culture of sexual harassment and assault continue unabated.
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“hey know how we cut a few developers loose and they created an iconic video game without our oversight? Should we do that again and forsake all profits and consumer goodwill a second time??”
Cue that Ants scene… they want to nip resistance in the bud, before it grows too large.
Anyone notice that Halifax is spelt 3 different ways in the article?
My personal favourite is Hailfox.
All Hail The FOX.
Faxy Lody
Boom Boom!
But what does it say?
LMAO, a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard, how do you even do this?
a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard
Maybe the author has a Dvorak keyboard layout (a and o are next to each other there).
I see only see Hailfax but maybe they corrected the fox one.
Wow, a whole unionized and competent studio now free to pursue internally chosen productions? I sure hope they don’t get some of those “Canadian Heritage” media subsidies. Seriously though this is the shit the state should be funding, it’d be a shame to have this kind of resource squandered.
Yep. Rename to Unisoft and start making good games.
Scarcisoft?
