Ubisoft Staff List Specific Demands of Management

Ubisoft staff have created a list of specific demands it wants to see from Ubisoft after finding CEO Yves Guillemot's response to their first open letter lacking.

More than 1,000 Ubisoft employees signed an open letter criticizing what they see as the company's failure to adequately root out the employees responsible for the sexism and bullying ingrained in the company culture.

Guillemot's email listed many of the attempts management has made to improve the company's culture, but Friday's letter from employees described those efforts as insufficient.

"We want to say that we have read and acknowledged the public response and the message from Yves tonight," the letter, published by Axios Gaming's Stephen Totilo, says. "It seems, however, that the majority of our demands were sidelined and few of our points have been addressed."

"Ubisoft continues to protect and promote known offenders and their allies. We see management continuing to avoid this issue."

The letter calls for the following changes at Ubisoft:

• Stop promoting, and moving known offenders from studio to studio, team to team with no repercussions.
• We want a collective seat at the table, to have a meaningful say in how Ubisoft as a company moves forward from here.
• Cross-industry collaboration, to agree to a set of ground rules and processes that all studios should can use to handles these offenses in the future. This collaboration must heavily involve employees in non-management positions and union representatives.

Although the letter refers to union representatives, Ubisoft does not have an active union.

Ubisoft employees were inspired to renew discussions around the company's toxic culture by employees at Activision Blizzard who have criticized and protested their own employer's response to a lawsuit accusing it of harboring a similarly sexist workplace. Many Blizzard employees participated in a walkout of the company's Irvine, California campus Wednesday, but organizers say they are not actively discussing unionization.

Ubisoft employees' call for industry standardization is the most ambitious demand yet.

"We want to see real, fundamental change within Ubisoft and across the industry, for the sake of our members," reads the letter from Ubisoft employees. "Again, we look forward to a response that addresses all the issues raised and properly acknowledges our demands."