A Liberation report (Google translated) says 5 former Ubisoft staff, together with former chief inventive officer Serge Hascoët and vice chairman of editorial and inventive companies Tommy François, have been arrested in France for questioning about allegations of sexual harassment and abuse whereas on the firm.
The arrests had been made following a greater than year-long investigation into separate complaints made by two victims and Solidaires Informatique, a French recreation business union that sued Ubisoft in 2021 for enabling and inspiring a tradition of “institutional sexual harassment” on the firm. The report says Paris Judicial Police interviewed roughly 50 present and former Ubisoft staff as a part of its investigation.
Allegations of widespread sexual misconduct at Ubisoft first got here to gentle in 2020, forcing a number of executives to step down in consequence, together with Hascoët, François, vice chairman Maxime Beland, managing director of Ubisoft’s Canadian studios Yannis Mallat, and world head of human sources Cécile Cornet. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot rapidly promised a “structural shift” to handle office toxicity on the firm, saying that modifications wanted to be carried out “in any respect ranges of the group.” Guillemot didn’t step down himself, nonetheless, and stays on the head of Ubisoft.
A yr later, Guillemot stated that “necessary progress” towards altering the corporate’s tradition had been made, though many staff did not agree: A day earlier than Guillemot’s assertion, almost 500 Ubisoft staff signed an open letter saying they’d “seen nothing greater than a yr of form phrases, empty guarantees, and an incapability or unwillingness to take away identified offenders.”
Solidaires Informatique echoed that sentiment in a message posted to Twitter, saying that Ubisoft’s response to the allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse on the firm “was to let go sure high-profile harassers (not often by dismissal) and to introduce a sequence of measures with no noticeable impact.” It additionally claimed that HR staff who didn’t cease the misconduct had been left alone, “and had been even promoted,” and that Ubisoft allowed toxicity to flourish “as a result of it was thought of extra worthwhile for the corporate to go away predators in place than to guard staff.”
A lawyer representing the 5 former staff additionally pointed the finger at Ubisoft for institutionally encouraging office misconduct, telling Liberation that “past easy particular person habits, [the case] reveals systemic sexual violence.”
“The corporate appears to have reworked into an enormous playground for inventive individuals, the place what they name a ‘schoolboy environment’ was tolerated, the place we play ‘chat-bite’, the place we bask in sexual gestures,” legal professional Maude Beckers stated (Google translated). “At work, the place within the night girls discover themselves pinned to the bottom or in opposition to the partitions. HR knew all this and systematically suppressed enterprise. What is outstanding on this matter is the complicity of the corporate’s white-collar staff.”
Ubisoft declined to touch upon the arrests, saying in a press release supplied to PC Gamer that it “has no data of what has been shared and subsequently cannot remark.”
