Friday November 8, 2 p.m. Nearly fifty souls stand on a sidewalk in eastern Paris, banners and hot coffees in hand to brave the autumnal squalls. A few meters away is the Don’t Nod video game studio, some of which are employees here, and to whom we owe the license Life is Strange. Like a significant part of the company, they went on strike to protest against a job protection plan (PSE). “Up to 69” Jobs are threatened in this company which has just under 340 (or 20% of the workforce), their management announced on October 16.
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Flags in the colors of the Video Game Workers Union (STJV) dominate this small Parisian crowd. The day before, the STJV relayed an open letter signed by more than 150 employees of the Parisian branch of Don’t Nod (another studio exists in Montreal, Canada). “Our main demand is the outright cancellation of this PSEsummarized with the Monde Tristan (he does not want his last name to be used), member of the company’s social and economic committee. We find it absurd to end up removing 69 people from their positions for errors made by management. »
The participants in this mobilization, thought of as a continuation of a first walkout organized on October 28 and followed by a third of the employees, hope that it will make the management of the studio bend, while meetings between the staff representation bodies and company leaders need to step up in the coming weeks. Contacted, these same leaders did not respond to requests from Mondeinvoking by e-mail “confidentiality constraints surrounding this dialogue”and specifying “not having precise information on the number of people participating in the strike”.
“We were never listened to”
In the press release it sent to the press and its shareholders – Don’t Nod has been a company listed on the stock exchange since 2018 – management justifies these future layoffs by “a context of degraded results” due to “economic poor performance of the latest launches” of his video games. Tristan, for his part, believes that this plan is unfounded. “Normally, a PES is prepared, sourced, with documents and calculations which justify the figures used to justify the elimination of certain positions. There, what we have been given is either obsolete, insufficient, or remains far too superficial. »
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