Ubisoft under fire for alleged ‘crunch culture’ while making one of its biggest flops

A studio underneath the Ubisoft publisher reportedly suffered such significant crunch that it burnt out 10 percent of the entire workforce, only for the game they worked on to be dubbed a financial underperformer and serve as an attributing reason for canceling other Ubisoft titles.

The development of Just Dance 2023 at the Ubisoft Paris studio led 10 percent of the employees there to claim they were burnt out during the project, according to a report from French labor union Solidaires Informatique. These crunch-propelled feelings of burnout reportedly led to numerous work stoppages for employees to take sick leave.

In a follow-up report released by entertainment news publication NME, numerous anonymous employees who worked on Just Dance 2023 spoke to the outlet via the union and claimed that the development process of the game was a “mess.” The employees claimed that the team was tasked with changing the game’s engine less than a year before launch and that they tried to push back the launch to 2024, only to be told “Just Dance [2023] must be under Christmas trees.”

The employees have also claimed that Ubisoft Paris initially promised to hire more staff and not push paid overtime on the team, only to go back on that promise and for paid overtime to become more commonplace. Some employees reportedly worked shifts longer than 14 hours and were “explicitly encouraged to work overtime.”

As if the reported crunch wasn’t bad enough on its own, the Ubisoft company later cited the financial “underperformance” of Just Dance 2023 in a massive cost-cutting endeavor announced back in January 2023. In this announcement, Ubisoft yet again delayed the launch of Skull and Bones, canceled three unannounced projects, and cut millions of Euros worth of costs to make the company “leaner.”