Almost five years ago, faced with the first confinements linked to Covid-19, the video game industry massively and hastily adopted the use of teleworking. Time has passed, the years of the pandemic, economically prosperous for the sector, have ended, a period of uncertain economic transition has begun, and now most large companies are deciding to bring their employees back to the office. To the great dismay of those first concerned.
In France, employees of the giant Ubisoft and their unions have been mobilizing for several months against what they consider to be a forced return to face-to-face work. The company announced in September that it wanted to review its management of teleworking on a global scale and require its French workforce to physically return to its various branches in France at least three days a week (compared to two for around 80 % of its French employees, since 2021). Several strikes have taken place since then, and negotiations are still underway on an issue which crystallizes many other tensions at the French video game giant.
This backpedaling on remote working is not limited to Ubisoft, far from it: at Spiders, another French player, threats to teleworking are regularly denounced; abroad, the Rockstar Games studio, to which we owe the franchise Grand Theft Autoannounced in February 2024 its desire to impose five compulsory days of presence per week on its workforce; a year, even two years earlier, it was industry giants like Blizzard Entertainment and Riot Games who adopted similar policies.
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Why is the video game sector, like the technology sector, now backtracking on teleworking? Some bosses cite concerns about productivity or company culture. Contacted, Ubisoft management, for its part, highlights “the unique benefits of being on site together, including cohesion, collaboration effectiveness, integration and employee training”. Arguments which struggle to convince a large part of its employees accustomed to teleworking, and some of whom now live far from their employer's offices, or even have never set foot there.
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