Ubisoft Halifax was the company's first North American studio to unionize. It is now being shut down, with over 70 developers being laid off.

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.

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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.

Corhen
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So do we in Canada… But that doesn’t mean that they are enforced

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Ok so did they organize and sue the company?

Cuz enforcement usually requires more work such as a class action suit. Lawyers aren’t just jumping out there suing companies and filing the paper work to protect workers all on their own. There’s usually at least one person organizing it.

So who’s the person who got let go at Ubisoft that got it started?

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“we’d rather amputate that entire source of revenue than pay workers fairly”

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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??”

Arghblarg
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Cue that Ants scene… they want to nip resistance in the bud, before it grows too large.

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removed by mod

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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

Canaconda
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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.

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I like to think that we’re all working class, and that to subdivide classes further benefits only the capital

ms.lane
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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.

bufalo1973
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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.

ms.lane
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That’s well natured but naive.

Richer ‘working class’ already do shit on the poorer classes, they already punch down with ferocity.

bufalo1973
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Don’t get me wrong. I’m talking about not treating then as special but just as anyone else and reply as you would with anyone else, not as if they are superior.

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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.

Laurel Raven
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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.

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I agree, but I think there are enough people who conflate working class with blue collar that making the distinction is justified.

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highly paid developers

Not in the games industry, lol

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Really? I always assumed they made more than developers in the “enterprise” world.

Ms. ArmoredThirteen
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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

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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?

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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.)

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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”.

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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.

chocrates
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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.

Laurel Raven
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On the flip side, errors in 3D graphics typically won’t cost a company millions, while errors in an SQL query very well might

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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.

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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

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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.

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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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hayvan
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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.

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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

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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.

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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…

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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.

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Yea… I definitelly need to do that…

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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).

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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.

Logi
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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?

E: obviously this is the FermAI Paradox.

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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

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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.

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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!

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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.

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I mean I own stocks and stuff in index funds, so… AM I THE CAPITAL?? lol jk

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“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.

Tony Bark
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Ubisoft is just seeding their own demise.

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They weren’t my favorite studio before, but they’re definitely never getting another dime from me. There’s a lot of fish in the sea.

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Ubisoft has been utter shir for more than a decade.

I used to love Prince of Persia, I tried to play Warrior Within half a year ago, that’s how much I love it.

But it hasn’t been the same, it’s just generic shit all over the place.

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Have you played the two new prince of Persia games? They are very good. But not the same gameplay as the ps2 classics.

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Ubisoft asked the Rayman team (who have produced some of the best platformers) to develop Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, regarded as the best metroidvania of 2024.

It failed to meet sales expectations, so they disbanded the teams and cancelled the sequel.

Turns out gamers™️ do vote with their wallets, and they vote for churned out sequels.

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No, even Two Thrones felt off.

The combat and movement was so good in WW that I didn’t try anything new after TT.

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It amazes me that anyone played any far cry or assassins creed game in the last 10 years and went “yes this is a good game”. All they make is bare minimum surface level crap and it’s been that way for a loooooong time.

For Honor was their last good game.

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Thanks for reminding me Assassins Creed Syndicate came out 10 years ago.

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oof

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Painful, but these companies need to fuck off then.

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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.

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They realy could make another clair obscur

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Yep. Rename to Unisoft and start making good games.

oce 🐆
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Scarcisoft?

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Right… They closed it as a “cost-cutting measure” and “not because the studio unionized”. This is where the lawmakers are just letting everyone know that they are garbage to be walked all over. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that “cost-cutting” a studio that just unionized is because they unionized, because a union means they have to start paying their workers their fair share, which means “higher costs” to them, when it should’ve been like that from the start.

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Anti-union industry is vast.

You have advisors that have preprepared media statements, threats, worker conditioning propaganda, etc.

But ultimately it’s the govs issue not to enforce the law.

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When the butchers at a single Walmart successfully formed a tiny union, Walmart responded by firing every butcher in every store in the company and switching to pre-packaged meats only.

Lexi Sneptaur
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How does this sort of thing usually get handled in Canada anyway?

Canaconda
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A lot of the reasons unions form in the USA are mitigated by Canadian labour laws. So you generally only see them in large work forces such as government employees, school teachers, and trades. People already get severance pay based on length of employment for getting fired without cause. If you’re laid off you can get EI (60% wages from gov’t).

So to answer your question… nothing probably -though I am speculating. Unless they did something egregious they likely broke no laws.

eddanja
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B-b-but I thought it wasn’t about unions…

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It’s about sensitive company knowledge!! such as uh…, the fact that we’re union busters

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Lol i dont even play ubi games anymore they dont put out much good stuff

flandish
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capitalism is terrorism

Hemingways_Shotgun
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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.

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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.

Hemingways_Shotgun
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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.

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I live in Germany. Here its not mandated to have a workers representative council, but you are entitled to be allowed to make one. A workers representative council is distinct from a union, though.

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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.

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That would be normal in a socialist society, not in a capitalistic one.

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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.

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So how do they do it?

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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.

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But union busting being illegal is the state getting involved.

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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.

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“Doesn’t need government” proceeds to name gov protection

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Was a bit tired when writing the comment, should have been adjusted to minimal involvement as the main procedures should still be between workers and companies with the state just guaranteeing that these procedures can take place at all.

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Now that’s a nuanced take!!! That I’m on board with.

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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!

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Damn, didn’t even know about those. Starting to sound like the US is just majorily fucked up with how they perceive the neverending chase for more profits (and money in the owners pockets). The problem still with government involvement is that it can then just as easily be removed and you’re back on square one. I’m not well informed enough about the US to actually give any valid input on how you would actually solve this.

@[email protected]
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With stronger union protections, necessary unions will form organically.

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Look at Belgium for a good example of how they are mandated.

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Anyone notice that Halifax is spelt 3 different ways in the article?

My personal favourite is Hailfox.

LMAO, a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard, how do you even do this?

Image of some Ubisoft developers at a game conference stand captioned: Ubisoft Hailfox Unionized to "Shape the Future of Ubisoft Halifax and the Industry at Large"

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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).

Ricky Rigatoni
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All Hail The FOX.

ms.lane
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Boom Boom!

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Faxy Lody

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I see only see Hailfax but maybe they corrected the fox one.

ZeroOne
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I have this rule; if a game requires 8 GB as minimum requirements, then DO NOT BUY IT EVER

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… What?

ZeroOne
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Basically Ubisoft makes games that are so not optimized & require you to have a monster of a PC to run. And the last time I checked it’s also most AAA games. Anyone that doesn’t put in the effort of optimizing games is someone who doesn’t care about good industry practices & is probably a money-hungry asshole who likes to use & toss people aside.

This rule has not led me astray yet.

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I trust this rule is from 1998 and hasn’t budged since.

Jaysyn
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My 10+ year long Ubisoft boycott still looking like a good idea.

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indeed

Magnum, P.I.
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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.

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I started to boycott Ubisoft when I can’t think of a single game of theirs I would even want to play.

Magnum, P.I.
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I really wanted to play Watch Dogs when it came out. Unfortunately they also publish a lot of games. They have some cool titles ngl, but I pull through.

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12M

I pirated it at some point, it’s was as expected, stuffed with repetitive boring tasks to increase playtime. Didn’t get far before deleting it.

Oh and driving was still beyond broken over a year past release

Magnum, P.I.
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Oof yeah ok dodged that bullet I guess 😂

NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ
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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.

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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

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Almost any large capitalist company, especially those that are publicly traded, will devour its own in the name of higher Q3 profits.

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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.

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French companies outside of France might as well be American with the way they treat non French workers.

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Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

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