It’s been confirmed that 124 more jobs have been cut at Ubisoft - this time across IT teams and business administrative services. The company has already seen multiple waves layoffs this year.
In a statement, Ubisoft said that the cuts to staff are being made in an attempt to "streamline our operations and enhance our collective efficiency” (via IGN). Of the 124 roles, 98 were based in Canada, with some of the cuts being made within the Montreal Hybride VFX Studio (the rest were from the global IT team).
Ubisoft said that “these are not decisions taken lightly”, and added that the company is providing “comprehensive support” to anyone affected by the layoffs. It added (via IGN): “We also want to share our utmost gratitude and respect for their many contributions to the company. This restructuring does not affect our production teams.”
The games industry has been continually impacted by layoffs this year, with Destiny developer Bungie being one of the most recently affected. However, as mentioned further above, Ubisoft alone has faced multiple cuts, with the closure of Ubisoft London in September, and redundancies within the Customer Relation Center team in May.
Elsewhere in the industry, it was confirmed in late September that Fortnite developer Epic Games was cutting 830 jobs (about 16% of the company’s workforce), after it was concluded that “layoffs are the only way.” At the time, CEO Tim Sweeney revealed that the company had “been spending way more money than we earn” for some time, and while he’d been “optimistic” that redundancies may not be necessary, he added that “in retrospect, I see that this was unrealistic.”
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