After a difficult year that’s seen multiple games fall short of sales expectations, original Life Is Strange developer Don’t Nod is implementing a “reorganization project” that could impact up to 69 jobs – or, as the French union that represents Don’t Nod workers points out, 29 percent of Don’t Nod’s Paris workforce. In light of this, the union, STJV, has denounced company leadership and called for workers to mobilize and defend their jobs.
Don’t Nod has previously said that its latest releases, Jusant and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, fell short of “commercial expectations,” leading it to “temporarily” pause two other in-development projects. Despite a focus on the upcoming and thus far well-received Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, Don’t Nod now says that “amid deteriorating results” it has been “compelled to consider a reorganization project to safeguard its competitiveness in an increasingly demanding and competitive ecosystem.”
STJV, which earlier this year published a post criticizing Don’t Nod for a burnout-inducing work environment in which "each project erratically follows another," has deemed the layoff plan “the climax of a series of catastrophic decisions, denounced for a long time by workers' representatives.”
“Management is hiding being 'the state of the economy' and 'a very competitive market' as excuses for its failures, without ever questioning its inconsistent decisions, which have been harmful to the studio and its workers,” wrote Don’t Nod’s STJV union section in a post published today.
Workers, they say, must fight back. Specifically, they cite mass mobilization at Ubisoft, which has included strikes – something STJV also helped organize.
"The Don't Nod union section, as well as the whole of the STJV, cannot tolerate the company rejecting the responsibilities of its own failures on its workers. We warned them long ago, but they ignored us and accused us of being too aggressive to speak with,” the Don’t Nod STJV union section wrote. “Faced with executives who have decided to mock their workers, a social movement like the one currently happening at Ubisoft is necessary. It is up to us to establish the necessary balance of power to save our jobs. We will not pay for our bosses' mistakes."
