◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek July 27, 202018
Nina Stewart was working at Ubisoft’s cus-
tomer service center in Morrisville, N.C., last
year when, she says, her manager started making
strange comments to her. He would detail other
women’s bodies in explicit ways and make deroga-
tory comments about hers, she says. “He’d make
sexist and fatphobic remarks about me to my whole
team,” Stewart says. “Every time he’d say some-
thing disgusting, I’d tell him that was inappropriate.
I’d say, ‘That makes me uncomfortable.’”
Stewart went to Ubisoft HR twice about her
manager, and both times she was told to “talk it
out” with him, she says. It was only after her third
visit, she says, when a male co-worker corroborated
her claims, that the company removed her boss. “I
received a thank-you card from HR,” Stewart says.
Attached to the note was a $200 Visa gift card, she
says. She’s since left the company.
The Toronto office was especially problematic,
six current or former employees there say. The stu-
dio was run by Maxime Béland, his wife, Rima Brek,
and another husband-and-wife team. Brek served for
a time as interim director of HR, the people there
say. Two women who reported incidents to Brek
and other HR reps in Toronto say they felt ostracized
afterward and were labeled as troublemakers. Brek
didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Béland was a trusted lieutenant of the creative
chief. He was also known for his quick temper and a
tendency to scream at subordinates in meetings, say
four people who worked in the office. Two of those
people say they saw Béland touch women inappro-
priately at holiday parties and other work events.
Béland was also accused of choking an employee
at a party, according to the video game website
Kotaku. The choking story was regularly shared
among staff in Toronto, say the people who worked
there, as a warning about the executive. Béland
didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Back in Paris, another one of Hascoët’s men
had developed a problematic reputation. Tommy
François, a 13-year veteran of Ubisoft, openly flirted
with subordinates, made homophobic jokes, and
performed unwanted massages, say 10 people
who witnessed or were the subjects of his alleged
abuses. François didn’t respond to requests for
comment. Newcomers to the company were told it
was “Tommy being Tommy,” the people say.
A woman who worked at headquarters says
she faced repeated harassment there. Colleagues
sent her sexually explicit messages, including por-
nographic videos, she says. François, who was sev-
eral levels above her on the org chart, asked her out
for a drink four or five times, and she refused each
invitation, she says. The woman, who asked not tobe identified over concerns that speaking publicly
would damage her career, says she reported all of
the incidents to HR and nothing happened. Later
she was told she’d have to move to a Ubisoft studio
in a different country. She did, and says she was fre-
quently told there “you can’t be a producer—you’re
a woman.” Less than a year after relocating, she quit.
People who worked in Hascoët’s department
describe pornographic videos on computers, boozy
lunches, and a chorus of inappropriate jokes. Five
workers say they reported François to HR over the
past decade, some of them multiple times, for inci-
dents including sexual propositions and genital grab-
bing. One former employee says they wrote an email
to the CEO some years ago about problems with
François. Not long after, François was promoted.
The machismo of Ubisoft’s offices seeps into the
company’s games, current and former employees
say. Ubisoft’s biggest franchise is Assassin’s Creed,
a series of open-world action-adventure games inwhich players explore historic settings and sneak ▲ CEO Yves Guillemot
around killing people. Most games in the series star
male protagonists. This has been a point of conten-
tion as far back as 2014, when an Ubisoft creative
director said Assassin’s Creed Unity wouldn’t let peo-
ple play online as female characters because “it was
really a lot of extra production work” to add wom-
en’s clothing and animations to the game.
For the next game, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, an
early outline of the script gave equal screen time to
the twin protagonists, Jacob and Evie, according to
three people who worked on the project. In the end,
Jacob dominated the game. Assassin’s Creed Origins,
released in 2017, was originally going to injure or kill
off its male hero, Bayek, early in the story and give
the player control of his wife, Aya, according to two
people who worked on it. But Aya’s role gradually
shrank and Bayek became the lead instead.
Development of 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
went much the same way. The game tells the story of
siblings Kassandra and Alexios. The team originally▼ Ubisoft market value€8b40
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