Ubisoft and we are seeing another exodus, but this time employees are striking back.
Ubisoft Barcelona staff walking out over 51 proposed layoffs is organised labour drawing a line under a restructuring that the company has repeatedly insisted was almost over. Spanish union CGT is coordinating the action, which takes the form of six partial strikes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between June 30 and July 16, deliberately structured to disrupt without fully halting the studio's work. The trigger is a round of cuts that would eliminate 51 roles, roughly 28% of the Barcelona team's pre-layoff headcount, as Ubisoft refocuses the studio exclusively on the Rainbow Six franchise. That's a brutal proportion, and it lands on a workforce that has watched Ubisoft slash and slash again while promising each round would be the last.
The reason this walkout carries an edge of exhaustion is the context we've tracked all year, where Ubisoft's "final" round of cost-cutting keeps producing new casualties. Back in January, the company announced what it framed as a final drive for €200 million in savings, and yet here we are in summer with Barcelona bleeding, arriving hot on the heels of the outright closures of Ubisoft Winnipeg and Belgrade and a global publishing restructure that put up to 380 jobs at risk. Even Rainbow Six Siege itself, the very franchise Barcelona is being narrowed down to support, is absorbing a 12% staff reduction affecting around 120 people. So the studio is being told to bet its future on a franchise that's simultaneously being cut. Workers looking at that arithmetic have every reason to disbelieve any reassurance about stability, which is precisely why their central demand isn't just saving the 51 jobs now.
The Five-Year Demand Is a Vote of No Confidence
The standout item on the workers' list tells you everything about the trust that's evaporated between Barcelona staff and Ubisoft management. Alongside a binding continuity mandate to protect the 51 affected employees, the union is demanding a guarantee that blocks Ubisoft from carrying out another collective layoff at the studio for a minimum of five years. Workers aren't just fighting this round of cuts, they're insisting on a contractual promise that stretches half a decade into the future, which is a direct admission that they no longer believe a single Ubisoft assurance about their security. When a company has cried "final round" as many times as Ubisoft has, a five-year written guarantee is the only version of the promise that means anything. The rest of the demands round out the picture of accumulated grievance, including the immediate execution of internal promotions that were reportedly frozen unilaterally, a review of the salary and social benefits packages, and a return to a 60% work-from-home arrangement.
This Fight Has Been Building for Years
The remote-work demand is the tell that this dispute runs deeper than one layoff announcement. Barcelona's unions already took Ubisoft to court back in November 2024 over the company's return-to-office mandate, a case that reportedly still has no public resolution, so the WFH grievance is a years-old wound reopening rather than a fresh complaint. Layer that onto the layoffs and you get workers signalling that their problem isn't a single decision but Ubisoft's entire approach to its staff during this contraction. The action also doesn't exist in isolation, following a three-day strike coordinated by five French unions back in February, which makes clear that organised resistance is spreading across Ubisoft's workforce rather than flaring up in one place. All of this collides awkwardly with the story Ubisoft wants to tell, where it has protected its crown-jewel franchises inside the Tencent-backed Vantage Studios and reorganised everything else into tidy genre-focused "creative houses" on a path to stability. The workers striking in Barcelona are calling that narrative what they see it as, which is a euphemism for an endless squeeze whose human cost keeps landing on them. The financial pressure driving it is real, with Ubisoft having posted a staggering €1.3 billion loss for the fiscal year ending in March and net bookings down 17.4%, but a loss that size on the balance sheet doesn't make the cuts feel any more final to the people being asked to absorb them. The partial nature of the strikes leaves room to escalate, and given how little faith Barcelona's staff have left in the word "final," escalation looks entirely possible if Ubisoft doesn't move.
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