18-months late forecasts
The studio just announced – to financial press before the employees, as has been its MO – that it was under a safeguard procedure.
This process is distinct from the « jobs safeguarding plan » (PSE – redundancies plan), but is a necessary complement, since the company wouldn’t even have enough funds to get to the end of the PSE.
In the communiqué, CEO Oskar Guilbert writes that « a safeguarding process is an act of anticipation ». In december of 2025, management presented employee representatives with several financial scenarios. The best case, assumign 2 games would get funding, still included redundancies. The worst, in case no funding was found (which would come to be the reality we’re in), forecasted liquidation of the company through 2026. What sort of forecast is it when a company doesn’t react for 11 months after that, and 5 months after its own auditors raised an alert in may of this year?
In the midst of this forecasting frenzy, management summoned the CSE (employee representatives) on september 3rd to consult them on opening a safeguarding process. During the meeting, the CEO pressured members of the CSE to make them shorten the legally mandated delay and issue their opinion immediately. The CSE didn’t flinch, but it is still surprising to see management take over a month afterwards to actually enter the safeguarding process.
The CEO finished his address with empty remarks on how much attention was paid to employees, which everyone knows was bullshit and probably written by chatGPT.
The communiqué then states that the company is expecting to receive 5.6 M€ (7.5 – 1.9) in tax credits (Crédit d’Impôt Jeu Vidéo – CIJV). As we pointed out earlier this year, the company was sentenced due to harming the field’s workers’ collective interest: « the absence of recognition of the moral harassment situation on M. C. by management and the deficiencies of M. W. when it comes to employee safety have partially harmed the interests of the profession ». According to the CIJV’s « respecting labour laws » criteria, the CNC should logically withdraw Don’t Nod’s accreditation. We regret that Don’t Nod set itself up for failure in that regard by refusing to take measures againt harassment.
Over the last few years, if one were to find a positive to Don’t Nod’s financials, it was the absence of debt. The problem when you run out of cash and keep running from your responsabilities is that you have to artificially go into debt to be able to freeze them and keep the fresh cash on-hand. We were displeased to learn that the company has stoppped paying its social dues to URSSAF since july for this exact reason. This may be the farthest management « forecasted » so far.
Safeguarding jobs: not found
Despite marginal modifications, the target organization remains inadapted to finishing the last project in-development, P14.
Nearly all of the non-managerial jobs are cut: 6/6 animators, 3/3 character artists, 3/3 concept artists, 8/10 environmental artists, 2/3 sound designers, 4/8 game designers, 3/5 level designers, 6/6 associate producers, 18/22 programmers, 3/5 QA testers, 2/3 devops, 3/4 HR…
Management is extremely clearly going for heavily individualized targeting and hasn’t been shy about their intent to keep selected people in rather than jobs, which is illegal. This is achieved through their definition of professional categories:
- They delineated 47 categories (55 initially) for 140 employees, which is huge ;
- 23 categories contain only one person, either to keep that person or because management wants to fire them ;
- it doesn’t even apply its own « method » coherently, which contradicts the existing job descriptions already in place within the company.
Redundancy order criteria are another channel through which this is achieved. The criteria help very little in differentiating between employees outside of the very subjective « professional qualities » one.
To compensate for this massacre and keep on running with production on a game that, to this day, didn’t cut down on its scope and is keeping around a hundred persons busy, management is betting it all on outsourcing. Managers, who are usually seen as more competent and experienced than non-managers, are kept within the organization and studio management expects them to orchestrate the massive shift to outsourcing as well as take over the workload of the fired team members. Anyone with a little experience with video games production and sanity understands how out-of-touch such a plan is. The costs of outsourcing a project that was mostly internal up until now and the loss of the experience gained all throughout production seem to have been ignored in favour of short-term penny-pinching with unclear upsides.
Forcing things through
Management just concluded the sad farce of the PSE’s « negotiations ». It chose to go through with a unilateral decision and to leave its validation entirely to the regional agency for employment and industry.
Truthfully, it never intended to negotiate anything and didn’t even hide it. We were met only with bad faith and permanent gaslighting.
Management declares that it cannot offer anything: it’ll be the strict legal minima and you’ll be glad for it. A voluntary leave plan is out of the question because the company couldn’t even afford 2 more weeks of operations to put it in place, according to management. A collective performance agreement to reduce the management team’s salaries is seen as an insult (even though it would actually save money for the company).
This company has been driven into a wall for years, against all outsider wisdom, against any sort of reality-based assessment. For 2 years, employees have been living on the edge, in uncertainty and anxiety, all of it reinforced by internal comms that alternated between inexistance and outright lies. This impacted their health, as evidenced by the CSE who documented 6 workplace accidents in 2026 and recently had to launch an inquiry into a serious and imminent danger.
All the way back to 2024, the CSE, STJV and employees were warning about the risks of a second PSE (or worse) if management didn’t change its ways and if it kept putting all its eggs into one basket (P14). This is it. Over two years spent chasing for funding while being rejected over and over, tiring employees to make new demos constantly for each new trade show, meeting, Gamescom… Management left the situation to rot and us with it, by believeing that its dreams were real.
They ignored the CSE, middle managers, the STJV, financial auditors, all because they believed unyieldingly that a miracle would come and they’d find funds for a game that was too big, too ambitious and ultimately too expensive. They kept lying to workers by gesturing to the eventuality of a contract in july and august to work on not one, but two back-to-back demos fo Gamescom 2026 and in the following weeks. All the while, they stopped paying social contributions to URSSAF and were setting up for a new PSE, which they admitted to hiding from employees to avoid it deteriorating the mood when people still worked on the demos. What a way to thank us.
Come autumn, management pushed its luck up to the brink of insolvency. In doing so, it created debt to sustain its cash consumption, and a welcome excuse to get rid of most employees with bare legal minimum compensation: we’re penniless, please understand. We made sure of it, don’t worry. If we happen to get a funding contract right after, it’d be pure coincidence.
Adding insult to injury, management refused to let those who would be willing to leave earlier go though a voluntary leave plan. They do not care about the damage it deals to employees’ health, they made no risk prevention plan. Employees feel like hostages to a radicalized management, who keep playing with the livelihood and the future of 140 people with no care for the consequences of their actions.
The CSE consultation is nearing its end, and its opinion will be issued on november 3rd. Afterwards, the regional agency for employment and industry will have 21 days to decide on the plan, and if it is accepted, people could get their firing letters on novembre 25th.
If it were to be rejected however, management would have to go back to the drawing board and improvise because, as you might have gathered, planning for contingencies isn’t their forte.
– The Don’t Nod STJV union section