Unionised workers at Dishonored developers Arkane Lyon have published a fresh statement about the progress of negotiations with Microsoft over the studio’s potential closure. Aside from calling on Xbox management to make a redundancy offer proportionate to Microsoft’s colossal market value, they accuse the parent company of creating the very economic conditions cited as a reason for closing Arkane, and thereby “sabotaging” development of the forthcoming Marvel’s Blade.
Shared by French union Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo, the (slightly shonky) official English translation of the statement begins by insisting that “work on Blade is going fine” and that the game will measure up to previous Arkane Lyon releases, despite the stress of trying to pin down a new owner for the company, after Microsoft announced plans to part ways with Arkane and several other studios back in July. It then takes Microsoft to task for making an “outrageously low” redundancy offer to Arkane’s workers, and further accuses the Xbox company of essentially setting Arkane up to fail by imposing a hiring freeze and depriving the studio of resources.
“Microsoft chose to justify the closure on economic reasons,” the workers write. “But Microsoft is actually why those economic reasons even exist.” It asserts that Microsoft froze hiring “for 19 months, which artificially caused delay and additional cost”, only to then use those delays and extra costs “as a reason to close down the studio”. It also claims that Microsoft have “systematically” deprived Arkane of cash, by means of corporate mechanisms the statement doesn’t make wholly clear. “Even this closure itself is done against any financial logic, as closing Arkane today would probably be more expensive than finishing the game,” the statement adds, without going into detail.
“The truth is that Microsoft based its decision only on stone cold and inhuman logic, in which our lives, projects and dreams are voided, so we can better serve Microsoft’s short term financial goals,” the workers continue. They accuse Microsoft of “the brutal application of a never-ending search for maximum profit optimization”, citing years of mass layoffs across the Xbox company together with the recent voluntary buyout offering. “Arkane is profitable,” they add. “Just not profitable enough for Microsoft.”
The workers want a “solid offer” from Microsoft regarding the studio’s post-Xbox future, declaring that “when the company who decided that Arkane has to shut down is, according to many sources the most profitable in the world, with a net profit of more than 133 Billions of dollars in the past years, it would be the bare minimum to ensure that the redundancy plan offered by Microsoft is on [par] with their means.”
They list a few specific demands. Firstly, they want Microsoft to go beyond the work council consultation mandated by French law, “and actually give employees representative & unions a say in the discussion to choose a potential buyer”. They want Microsoft to create a fund to protect workers, if they’re fired by any hypothetical acquiring company “for economic reasons” in the 24 months after the deal.
If Arkane have to close, the unionised workers call on Microsoft “to release funds commensurate with Microsoft’s status as a corporation, to make sure that the workers are compensated in line with the loss suffered”. They’d like a redundancy payment of €200,000, two years of “redeployment support”, a package of “shared resources for training and studio creation”, including a residual bonus, and “compensation up to the redundancy payment for independent workers’ contract breach”, to safeguard the livelihoods of freelancers and contractors.
The warring parties at Xbox and Arkane have until 13th December this year to figure out a deal. Reportedly, Ubisoft are among those looking to buy Arkane – a source of some concern, given that Ubisoft have also recently closed a number of studios and laid many people off. I’m not sure I’d be waving my wallet around if I were using my other hand to sign pink slips.