Don't call it a layoff: Ubisoft issues a full return-to-office order for all employees as it confirms more studio closures are coming

Stuffed away in a corner of Ubisoft's latest high-speed skid off a cliff is a note for employees: "To support the effective implementation and operation of this new model, the Group also intends to return to five days per week on site for all teams." Employees who have been working remotely in any capacity, in other words, will no longer have that option: It's back to conventional office time for everyone.

"This evolution is intended to strengthen collaboration, including constant knowledge sharing, and the collective dynamic across teams," Ubisoft said, explaining the decision. "In-person collaboration is a key enabler of collective efficiency, creativity and success in a persistently more selective AAA market." In lieu of regular remote work, employees will be given "an annual allowance of working-from-home days."

It seems like a small thing amidst yet another Ubisoft catastrophe, but the reaction to the announcement is strongly negative, and rightly so. Remote work, by and large, works, and after years of doing so effectively and adjusting their lives accordingly, being ordered back to the office on a full-time basis is incredibly disruptive for employees suddenly find themselves faced with a need to find childcare, pay commuting costs, and absorb other related expenses, all with no compensating increase in pay—which is to say nothing of the massive and often unnecessary pain in the ass it is.

Because of that, some employees, and possibly many, simply won't do it. Which is the point: It's an effect companies have wielded strategically as a form of "soft layoffs," in which employees aren't actually laid off, but are instead presented with onerous conditions for continued employment that effectively coerces them into resigning.

The term can also be applied to, for example, a "voluntary career transition program" in which employees are given the choice to either quit now with some benefits, or risk getting shitcanned later with nothing.

Ring a bell? It happened recently at Ubisoft Massive, which in October 2025 offered employees "the opportunity to take their next career step on their own terms," and then dropped the hammer earlier this month when not enough of them did so.

And yes, more such cuts are coming: Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said today that as part of the company's latest bid to keep the lights on, it will "selectively close several studios and continue restructurings throughout the Group."

Does a return-to-office mandate fit well with a need to close studios and cut jobs? You bet it does, and we've seen it happen in the past. In 2023, for instance, a World of Warcraft producer said "Blizzard is losing amazing talent" because of Activision-Blizzard's RTO policy, and in April 2025, amidst contract negotiations with Microsoft, ZeniMax Workers United-CWA Local 6215 member Zachary Armstrong said "underpayment and costly RTO [return to office] initiatives have caused many of us to put our lives on pause because our income does not match even the rising cost of living in the cities where ZeniMax insists we live and work to maintain employment."

Ubisoft has done it too. In September 2024 the Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo (SJTV) union called for a strike when Ubisoft told workers that they'd have to come into the office at least three days a week.

The RTO mandate (and everything else) has sparked renewed ire from unions. Carmel Smyth, president of CWA Canada—the union representing the recently closed Ubisoft Halifax studio—said it is waiting for proof that the Halifax shutdown "was not to keep out the union," and added pointedly, "as much as the company cries poor, it did just buy a studio from Amazon in Montreal a month ago."

Ubisoft is also facing an entirely predictable strike action over what the French game industry union Solidaires Informatique called a "disastrous" restructuring announcement. The union's demands include "maintaining and extending the teleworking conditions."

UBISOFT - Call for strike Following the disastrous announcements made by Mr. Yves Guillemot (cost-cutting plan, projects scrapped, end of remote working, etc.), the Solidaires Informatique union is calling for a strike on Thursday, January 22, in the morning.

— @solinfonat.bsky.social (@solinfonat.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-21T23:31:07.219Z

Of course, I can't say that this is an intentional effort to shed hundreds of workers. But I can say that Ubisoft is eager—maybe even desperate—to do so, and as much as it tries to mask the maneuver in terms of collaboration and efficiency, it is what it is: Some employees will leave rather than return to the office, and that's what Ubisoft wants.