As part of an ongoing, brutal restructuring, Ubisoft today shut down two more studios, Winnipeg and Belgrade, and put additional employees at its Barcelona studio on the chopping block—adding up to a total of 380 jobs lost, pending consultation. But while Insider Gaming first broke the news of the Winnipeg location’s closure (and while some of those affected lamented the sad state of affairs on LinkedIn), other publications were informed by a different source: Ubisoft.
This is far from the first time a tech or video game company has confirmed layoffs to press, but in this particular instance, the news also came with a 1 PM ET / 6 PM BST embargo—the kind of thing typically reserved for reviews and product announcements, not people’s livelihoods. Also, most of the time when reporting on layoffs, journalists go to companies after receiving a tip from someone who's been affected; companies do not often come to journalists with this kind of information.
Insider Gaming’s Mike Straw, whose report prior to the embargo was based on details from sources within Ubisoft as opposed to Ubisoft PR, first claimed that several well-known outlets received information under embargo, and Aftermath has spoken to reporters at multiple outlets who confirmed that was indeed the case.
This has caused a stir on social media, with some developers and members of the press suggesting that outlets who agreed to an embargo around news of such immense consequence were effectively doing Ubisoft’s job for it.
The circumstances surrounding the news paint a slightly muddier picture. In at least one case, Ubisoft justified the embargo by saying that staff in Belgrade were still being informed at the time, according to reporters to whom Aftermath spoke. Ubisoft also reached out to members of the press relatively close to when the embargo was set to lift, meaning that if this was the first reporters were hearing of the layoffs, there wasn’t a ton of wiggle room for them to publish on their own terms.
But Ubisoft did, to a degree, put reporters in a bind, with some who agreed to the embargo telling Aftermath that Ubisoft did not specify the nature of the embargo before they said they’d adhere to it; the company only mentioned that it was going to announce something soon. Had reporters known more about what they were agreeing to, they might not have done so as readily, or at all.
Aftermath reached out to Ubisoft for more details but did not receive a reply as of this publishing.
The larger problem here is that oftentimes when companies lay people off, they do so callously, giving employees little time to prepare emotionally or financially. In those cases, workers deserve all the advance notice they can get—regardless of where it comes from—and companies deserve to publicly eat shit. Journalist complicity, especially when at least some employees have already been informed and are talking about it out in the open, benefits the company.
But layoffs are a sensitive subject; there’s a reason people generally consider it an institutional failing when those about to lose their jobs find out via journalists, rather than the company in question. This can lead to panic and uncertainty, especially as journalists work to assemble a complete picture of the carnage. It is, in many ways, a no-win situation, albeit one facilitated by the fundamental inhumanity of companies and the laws governing them. Everything else is a symptom, not the cause.
If nothing else, today’s layoff dustup should give reporters pause: Why were some’s first instinct to agree to a random embargo offered by a company? Does any major company deserve that level of implicit trust? And to what extent does this system—constructed around products, reviews, and release dates—impede journalists’ ability to efficiently dig deeper when circumstance demands it? Historically, big companies have made the rules in this industry, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep playing.
Additional reporting by Riley MacLeod.
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Nathan Grayson
