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Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced landed an 84 on Metacritic and a warm reception from players. Fifty-one people at Ubisoft Barcelona, several of whom actually built the thing, are now job hunting. Funny how that works.
If you’re waiting for the twist where the game secretly underperformed and this all makes grim corporate sense, there isn’t one. The cuts were reportedly coming regardless of how the launch went, because Ubisoft simply never lined up a new project for the team, despite Barcelona flagging that gap as far back as summer 2025. That’s not a studio reacting to bad numbers. That’s a studio that stopped planning a year in advance and let the consequences land on whoever happened to be standing there when the game shipped.
A party that never happened
One affected employee, speaking anonymously, described the layoffs as part of a wider pattern of mistreatment and a management culture that leaves staff with essentially no say in decisions about their own work. Hard to argue with that when the studio’s launch celebration got quietly swapped for a catering spread instead.
Ubisoft Barcelona’s staff aren’t taking it lying down either. Through the Video Game Union Coordinating Committee, they’ve called six strikes between June 30 and July 16, striking every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.
What gets me is how little the actual quality of the work seems to matter here. Reviews were good. Pre-orders were strong. None of it bought anyone job security, because the decision was never about the game. It was a staffing failure dressed up as business as usual, and the people who shipped a hit are the ones paying for it.
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