French video game developer Ubisoft shuttered its office in Halifax on Wednesday, laying off 71 people less than a month after the majority of the workplace voted to unionize.
“I have reasonable questions about the timing of all this.”
Jon Huffman, former lead programmer at Ubisoft Halifax
Ubisoft, which runs six studios in Canada, told employees that it was closing its Halifax office and terminating all positions, effective immediately. CWA Canada, the union that began officially representing 60 of the office’s workers last month, said in a statement shortly after that it would “pursue every legal recourse” to protect the affected workers.
The timing has prompted speculation about whether the closure was related to the union drive—a notion that Ubisoft vehemently denies.
“I have reasonable questions about the timing of all this,” Jon Huffman, a former lead programmer at Ubisoft Halifax and a member of the union organizing committee, told BetaKit on Friday. Huffman was one of the employees laid off on Wednesday.
Ubisoft spokesperson Antoine Leduc-Labelle denied that the unionization effort played a role in the studio’s closure, writing in an email to BetaKit on Wednesday that “the closure is linked to Ubisoft’s need for restructuring and cost-optimization, which began two years ago, well before the unionization process started at the studio in June 2025.”
Leduc-Labelle added that over the past two years, the company has sought to streamline operations and reduce costs, leading to the “difficult decision” to close the Halifax studio. The company said it’s committed to supporting impacted employees with resources, severance packages, and “additional career assistance.”
According to an email sent to employees on Jan. 7 and later obtained by BetaKit, “The catalyst for this decision is a shortage of viable work both immediately and in the forecasted future, resulting in the Halifax production team no longer having a justifiable mandate to maintain the continuation of the studio’s operations.”
The email, which is signed by Ubisoft management, said workers will receive eight weeks’ pay as part of their severance package. Employees’ health and dental insurance coverage will continue until March 4, but disability insurance coverage and life insurance coverage ended on Jan. 7, the email said.
CWA Canada said in a statement on Thursday it will demand more information from Ubisoft about the decision to close. The union represents various media workers across Canada, including at Microsoft-owned Bethesda Game Studios in Montréal.
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Ubisoft has faced financial difficulties in recent years and has closed or downsized studios in London, Osaka, and San Francisco. The company moved a few of its top titles, like Assassin’s Creed and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, into a subsidiary called Vantage Studios that Chinese tech giant Tencent took a 26-percent stake in this fall. In November, the company abruptly halted trading and postponed announcing its financial results. Meanwhile, its shares in France are trading at roughly half their value, compared to a year ago.
The Halifax studio, which is well known for the mobile game Assassin’s Creed: Rebellion, had been operating for 10 years. Global News reported that Ubisoft has received more than $12 million through the province’s Digital Media Tax Credit since 2017. The company has also been awarded grants through the Department of Labour, Skills and Immigration; for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025, Ubisoft received $26,484.
“Blindsided”
In an interview with BetaKit, Huffman said the workers were “blindsided” by the closure, particularly given what he called the amicable origins of the union efforts. He said that the team began considering unionizing after the Halifax-based studio Alpha Dog, owned by Microsoft, shut down in 2024.
“I’ve felt that workers’ rights in the video game industry have always been a questionable area, to say the least,” Huffman, who has worked in the industry for 15 years, told BetaKit. “The working conditions at Ubisoft Halifax were excellent.”
“It’s heartbreaking that this is where we’re at, when all of this was such a positive thing,” he said.
Huffman told BetaKit on Friday that the workers voted to unionize over the summer, but he said they were met with challenges from Ubisoft related to union eligibility of certain staff members. Ubisoft did not respond to BetaKit’s request for comment on this allegation by deadline.
“It’s heartbreaking that this is where we’re at, when all of this was such a positive thing.”
“The reason it took so long for us to actually have our vote counted and get certified was because of the company’s disagreements. They dragged it out,” Huffman said.
But in December, he said, Ubisoft suddenly dropped all of its challenges, and the union became certified on Dec. 18. The union had yet to negotiate a collective agreement.
Huffman said the majority of Ubisoft Halifax’s office was working toward an “aggressive” February deadline for a big game project that had been in the works for two years. Now, there has been no indication about whether that project will go forward.
Labour in video game tech
The Halifax office was the first Ubisoft workplace to unionize in North America, though other Ubisoft studios in France and other parts of Europe had successfully organized.
Liam McHugh-Russell, associate professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law, told BetaKit on Thursday that Canadian law prohibits retaliatory action against employees for unionizing. But unionized employees aren’t necessarily better protected from company layoffs.
“It’s possible to read the tea leaves here that this decision was taken as a way to punish these employees, or because the employees had joined the union,” McHugh-Russell said. “Or perhaps it was being done because if you shut down a unionized workplace, that’s really going to scare other employees in Canada … we don’t have evidence of this one way or the other.”
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McHugh explained that public sector unions are much more common in Canada, while unionization rates in the private sector (where most of Canada’s tech industry is concentrated) were closer to 15 percent in 2023.
Video game companies and other large tech companies have been accused of contributing to a chilly climate for unions. In December, the developer of Grand Theft Auto was accused of union busting when it fired a group of employees in the United Kingdom and a handful in Canada. Last year, retail giant Amazon shuttered all its warehouses in Québec, less than a year after one of the workplaces unionized.
In a press release on Thursday, CWA Canada said it had called Ubisoft to demand documents, emails, and other information about the closure. CWA said a Ubisoft spokesperson committed to providing information next week. The union said it would press Ubisoft to reassign or find employees alternate work at other studios.
As for next steps, McHugh-Russell explained that if a challenge to the layoffs is brought to the provincial labour board, it will have to weigh “direct and circumstantial evidence to figure out whether this was done to harm the union, or unreasonably in a way that harmed the union.”
Feature image courtesy Ubisoft under license Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.