Ubisoft CEO and others accused of “institutional harassment”

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Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot standing on an E3 stage in front of the company logo.

The publisher of Assassins Creed and Far Cry 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 has witnessed or directly victimized misconduct.

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

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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. , wrote Solidaires Informatique Jeu Vido in a statement released today on Twitter, a translation of which was provided to Kotaku by one of its members.

Ubisoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

Meanwhile, he holds Cécile Cornet, the company’s former head of human resources, who was fired in a sudden top management purge, from allowing 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 problems were open secrets.

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We believe that as a manager he was necessarily informed, Maude Beckers, the lawyer representing the victims in the complaint, told Agence France-Presse, based on a translation by Kotaku. It must be responsible for the company’s HR policy.

Despite being a year after Ubisofts’ #Metoo calculation, there are many concerns that the company has not completely reformed.

In May, the French publication Le Télégramme reported complaints from some current and former Ubisoft employees that there had been minimal changes at the company over the previous year. This prompted a letter from Guillemot himself outlining some of the actions the company has taken, including the hiring of a vice president of global diversity and inclusion, as well as mandatory harassment training.

But in June, Solidaires Informatique accused Ubisoft Montreal of continuing to host three managers accused of harassment or toxic behavior despite reports from other employees. And earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that concerns over 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 had allegations and remains at Ubisoft have had their case rigorously reviewed by a third party and have either been cleared or subject to appropriate disciplinary action, a Ubisoft spokesperson told Bloomberg earlier this month. this month. Employees who were investigated would not stay at Ubisoft if the results of the investigations justified their dismissal.

Despite the new #HoldUbisoftAccountable hashtag that sometimes appears on Twitter, Ubisoft has so far remained silent on its ongoing workplace complaints and the steps taken to address them. Nothing was said during its major video game showcases, the most recent of which was on June 12. On the business side, however, Ubisoft noted in a company report filed annually with regulators that it is now at high risk of losing talented employees due to the workplace. toxicity.

Beyond the list of people cited above, it is the functioning of this system that this complaint seeks to dismantle, specifies Solidaires Informatique Jeu Vido in its press release.

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