Kotaku reports that Canadian Ubisoft studios are raising employee salaries, allegedly to prevent developers from continuing to leave. For the first time in the company’s history, a salary increase is implemented in the middle of the year, but most employees are of the opinion that this is not a solution to the company’s problems.
Canadian studios are responsible for games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Far Cry 6 or Watch Dogs: Legion (although the latter was helped by both Parisians and Kievans). Although salary increases are primarily a welcome development, it is often the workers who are already getting a significant salary increase or those with higher incomes. A little math: Junior developers get a 5-7 percent increase in their annual salary of $50,000, which is a $2,500 increase in salary, while developers at the top of the corporate ladder can reap up to a 20 percent increase. For example, workers who earn $100,000 per year can expect an additional $20,000 per year.
Kotaku is one of the developers She saidThe measure will only exacerbate the wage gap between high and low paid employees. The developer added that the company did nothing to meet the requirements of A Better Ubisoft’s employee network anyway. At the same time, management is said to be fighting hard to keep the remaining talented young developers, at least that’s what the pay increase is supposed to be dealing with, because the fact that employees leave because of a toxic workplace is actually a serious problem at Ubisoft.
Furthermore, it has not been revealed if other studios plan to increase wages. These are the branches in Paris, Kiev and Singapore. It is said that there is a large wage gap between the locals and the French, and discrimination is also common. The Singapore team is developing Skull & Bones, which worked hard at the same time because the management approached the financing in a very irresponsible way. On the other hand, they seem to be doing well for some time with the game originally intended for AC Black Flag IV DLC, and they’ve begun to flesh out what will eventually happen.
At the time of the Activision-Blizzard scandal, Ubisoft employees said the company had not made any significant changes in a year to make the company a better place to work.