Far Cry maker Ubisoft accused of “institutional harassment”

Assassin’s Creed and Far cry The publisher Ubisoft is the target of a new complaint filed with the French courts which accuses the company, and its CEO and long-time co-founder, Yves Guillemot, of “institutional harassment”. According to a survey released last fall, one in four Ubisoft employees have either witnessed or directly suffered a fault.

The complaint was filed yesterday in the Bobigny Criminal Court on behalf of the French union Solidaires Informatique and two former Ubisoft employees.

“The complaint targets Ubisoft as a legal person for institutional sexual harassment for having put in place, maintain and strengthen a system where sexual harassment is tolerated because it is more profitable for the company to keep the harassers in place than to protect its employees ”, Solidaires Informatique Video Game wrote in a statement today on Twitter, a translation of which has been provided to Kotaku by one of its members.

Ubisoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. [Update – 2:00 p.m. ET, 7/16/21: “We do not have further details to share regarding the claim filed against Ubisoft,” a spokesperson for Ubisoft told Kotaku].

The complaint also targets several current and former Ubisoft employees, including former chief creative director Serge Hascoët, and former editorial vice president Tommy François, both whom quit the company last summer following several reports that they have engaged in sexual misconduct at the company’s Paris headquarters.

Meanwhile, he detains Cécile Cornet, former head of the company’s human resources department, who was dismissed from her post in a sudden purge of senior management, to allow “harassment to flourish within the company”. Although Guillemot is also named in the complaint, it is not for an activity in which he was directly involved, but for having been in charge of the company when these matters were open secrets.

“We believe that as a manager, he was necessarily informed,” Maude Beckers, the lawyer representing the victims in the complaint, told Agence France-Presse. Kotaku. “He must answer for the company’s HR policy.

Despite a year later Ubisoft’s #Metoo calculation, there are many concerns that the company has not completely reformed.

In May, French publication The Telegram reported complaints from some current and former Ubisoft employees that there had been minimal changes in the business over the past year. This prompted a letter from Guillemot himself highlighting some of the actions the company has taken, including the hiring of a vice president of global diversity and inclusiveness, as well as mandatory harassment training.

But in June, Solidaires Informatique accused Ubisoft Montreal to continue to accommodate three managers accused of “harassment or toxic behavior” despite having been reported by other employees. And earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that concerns about Ubisoft’s lack of follow-up had led to a “new round of complaints on Ubisoft’s internal bulletin board”. Kotaku also heard directly from several current Ubisoft employees who remain dissatisfied with the company’s continued response a year later.

“Any employee who has made allegations and remains at Ubisoft have had their case rigorously reviewed by a third party and have either been exonerated or subjected to appropriate disciplinary action,” said a spokesperson for Ubisoft. Told Bloomberg earlier this month. “Employees who were investigated would not stay with Ubisoft if the results of the investigations warranted termination.”

Despite the new hashtag #KeepUbisoftResponsible Trending occasionally on Twitter, Ubisoft has so far been silent on its ongoing workplace complaints and the steps it is taking to address them. Nothing has been said in its large video game windows, the most recent of which dates back to June 12. On the business side, however, Ubisoft noted in a company report filed annually with regulators that it is now at “high” risk losing talented employees due to toxicity in the workplace.

“Beyond the list of people cited above, it is the operation of this system that this complaint seeks to dismantle,” said Solidaires Informatique Jeu Vidéo in its press release.