Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its Ubisoft Halifax studio and lay off 71 people. Ubisoft's closure of the Assassin's Creed: Rebellion and Rainbow Six Mobile studio comes just weeks after a group of 60 employees voted to unionize with Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada. Seventy-four percent of the staff voted yes to unionize and create a wall-to-wall union including producers, designers, artists, testers, and researchers.
CWA Canada Local 30111, the chapter the Ubisoft Halifax workers joined, also includes more than a hundred workers at Bethesda Game Studios.
"Over the past 24 months, Ubisoft has undertaken company-wide actions to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs," a Ubisoft spokesperson said in a statement to Aftermath. "As part of this, Ubisoft has made the difficult decision to close its Halifax studio. 71 positions will be affected. We are committed to supporting all impacted team members during this transition with resources, including comprehensive severance packages and additional career assistance."
The Ubisoft spokesperson did not specifically address the closure's relation—or not—to the recent union vote.
CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That’s not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close."
"We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less."
Ubisoft has been cutting costs over the past several years: laying off staff, canceling games, and shutting down studios. In November, Ubisoft shared in its earnings report that it intends to continue to reduce its fixed costs—to reduce costs by an additional €100 million by the 2027 fiscal year—on top of the €200 million reduction it had already enacted. Part of that reduction was a decrease of roughly 1,500 employees in the 12 months prior to the November earnings report. Not all of those departures were layoffs, however.
Ubisoft required a $1.25 billion investment from Tencent last year, too, to spin off the company's most successful franchises: Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry, and Assassin's Creed. That initiative is called Vantage Studios, led by Charlie Guillemot and Christophe Derennes. "Vantage Studios represents a first step in Ubisoft's ongoing transformation," Ubisoft said in a news release from October.
In 2020 workers at Naughty Dog, developers of the Uncharted and Last Of Us series,came forward with reports of brutal, 12-hour work days and sustained periods of what's known ascrunch:
Many who have worked at Naughty Dog over the years describe it as a duality—as a place that can be simultaneously the best and the worst workplace in the world. Working at Naughty Dog means designing beloved, critically acclaimed games alongside artists and engineers who are considered some of the greatest in their fields. But for many of those same people, it also means working 12-hour days (or longer) and even weekends when the studio is in crunch mode, sacrificing their health, relationships, and personal lives at the altar of the game.
In 2021, in response to those reports, Naughty Dog bosses Evan Wells and Neil Druckmannsaid they were 'assessing ways the studio can improve', with Druckmann insisting there wasn't one single solution to the problem:
...in the past where we’ve said, “Okay, no working past this hour,” or, “It’s mandatory that no one can work on Sunday,” and they’re always a lot of corner cases of someone saying, “Well, I couldn’t work on Friday because I had to be with my kids. It’s actually more convenient for me to come in on Sunday.” When you try to have a silver bullet, like one solution, you’re always leaving someone behind. That’s why we feel like we need multiple solutions. We have to approach this from multiple angles.
In 2024,in a documentary detailing the production of The Last Of Us 2, Druckmann said, "We now have the goal for Naughty Dog to eliminate crunch", before quality assurance lead Patrick Goss added, "When we onboard people, we tell them that we have a reputation as a studio for crunching, and it's something that we don’t want. And it's something we're not going to do anymore".
In December 2025 (as in, today), Jason Schreier at Bloomberg has reported:
For the past seven weeks, the Santa Monica-based studio behind The Last of Us has been pushing its staff to work long hours to get ready for an upcoming review of the [Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet] demo by its parent company, according to people familiar with the situation. Starting in late October, staff were asked to begin working a minimum of eight extra hours a week and logging their overtime in an internal spreadsheet, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. This overtime period was an attempt to get the production back on track after several missed deadlines.
Workers were also told to get back into the office five days a week (they had only been required for three). What's notable here is that this cycle of crunch--which lasted for just under two months--wasn't even to finish the game, which isn't due until 2027, but just to finish a demo.
Also of note, from the end of Jason's story:
Earlier this year, members of the production team were each given customized metal coins that seemed to capture, purposefully or not, the current state of the studio’s workplace attitude. On one side was the company’s paw-print logo. On the other, a quote from the trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet: “The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end.”
Today the overwhelming majority of workers at Doom studio id Software – 165 of around 185 total employees – announced that they’re forming a wall-to-wall union in conjunction with Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union that’s aided thousands of game workers across Microsoft in organizing.
"id Software is historically important – one of the more famous American studios that survived a length of time that few others have,” id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was part of the organizing effort from the jump and filed the initial paperwork to CWA, told Aftermath. “So it feels really awesome to get this done for something with such historical and cultural importance."
"With Bethesda unionizing, it was a push for people [at id] to start talking, and that's when it started,” id Software lead services programmer Chris Hays told Aftermath. “But then the big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people. People decided that it was time that we took our future into our own hands."
"The big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people."
id itself, Hays said, has suffered “a few” layoffs “here and there” in recent years, but nothing comparable to the scale of Zenimax Online Studios, which lost hundreds of employees earlier this year amid Microsoft’s latest round of mass layoffs and project cancellations. Now, he believes, is the time to secure workers’ rights – before the scythe swings, as opposed to after.
"Not that we're not scared that [layoffs] will one day come," said Hays. "In fact, avoiding each of the previous rounds has made us more anxious about if the next round will be us. And the most recent round of layoffs happened after several [studios] had already organized. People [at id] can see what it was that they got. We got to see them negotiating where they didn't actually lose their jobs [for a couple months]. They were still on payroll. They still had their health insurance. ... They had the extra time to make sure they could get their lives [in order], and many have actually gotten their jobs back through negotiations on where they could place people in the company."
CWA has been able to successfully unionize so many studios within Microsoft and Activision Blizzard in large part due to a legally binding neutrality agreement it struck with the company in 2022 when it was facing regulatory scrutiny over its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. That deal lapsed earlier this year, but according to Hays, only on the Activision Blizzard side of things.
"For us under Zenimax, there's actually a separate neutrality agreement, and that one is still valid until May [2026]," said Hays. "But that was definitely on our minds when we were looking at when we wanted to think that we had enough support [to unionize]. … We knew that it was really special for us to have the neutrality agreement, to have the freedom to be able to talk to each other more openly and not face the kind of pushback you would have in other unionization campaigns. We wanted to make sure that we took advantage of the benefit while we had it."
While the union plans to conduct a bargaining survey before members go to the table with Microsoft to hammer out a contract, preliminary discussions have focused on a few pillars: benefits, remote work, and AI.
"There's a lot of blind spots in our benefits, and a lot of us don't know what we have and what we don't and where things are lacking,” said Hays. “When talking with a lot of people, some would say 'Oh, I think we're lacking this particular kind of benefit, or something around child care.' Personally, I'm really motivated to get protections around remote work and responsible use of AI."
"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more.”
Remote work has been a sticking pointat multiple Microsoft studios, with many issuing return-to-office mandates despite teams’ demonstrable success collaborating from across the country – and even the globe – in 2020 and 2021.
"We actually launched Doom Eternal during covid,” said Hays. “The month of [the launch], we started our work from home. ... We did a launch event, the whole internet fell apart, and we had to learn how to do all of that remote. And then starting a project [Doom: The Dark Ages] from the beginning, all remote, we learned a lot of lessons. On my team, we learned to change how we work, to be more remote friendly. We ended up becoming more productive as a result. So we've done this before. We've learned lessons, and I think we can continue to use that. We shouldn't just throw away all the great wins we got with remote work."
As for AI, Willis was cagey about precisely how it’s being used within id, noting that going into specifics would involve divulging secrets about proprietary tech. But he said that in his view, some of the current applications are “good,” while others are… less so.
"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more,” Willis said. “In what ways and how careful they're being about implementing it within the studio to actually benefit the creation of a better game or a more efficient process, I personally don't think that's being done in a careful enough way to have it be beneficial.”
Last year, the Zenimax QA union secured AI protections that commit the company to uses of AI that "augment human ingenuity and capacities ... without causing workers harm" and require that Zenimax provides notice to the union in cases where "AI implementation may impact the work of union members and to bargain those impacts upon request." Willis and Hays hope the new union can make something similar happen under id’s roof.
"We are going to be in a fortunate position in that we have a lot of other people who've gone through this,” said Hays, “so we can look at what they have bargained for, especially around AI, and take that as a starting place, which hopefully means that it's going to be easier for us than anyone before."
"It would be difficult to say [if we’ll make Israel a core bargaining issue] without seeing what the bargaining surveys comment on, but I can say for myself personally that, yeah, I want no part in [Israel's] usage of Microsoft tools and the deals between Israel and Microsoft," said Willis.
"The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience."
More broadly, Willis believes the union will allow for more input from developers, as opposed to execs who have never shipped a game and, indeed, might not play them at all.
"We see the direction the industry is headed,” said Willis. “The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience – not just from the management standpoint, but zero experience in actually making games. ... I find little evidence of them really enjoying games or playing games personally."
“I think the more video game studios that unionize, and the greater percentage of video game employees that are in a union, it's not just better for them as individuals or folks that are raising families or have mortgages; it keeps talent from shedding,” he added. “You get to keep people in the industry who have experience and the amount of game credits that allow them to do things and create games that a contract-only or much more volatile workforce simply couldn't.”
