The STJV relays this message from ex-Starbreeze Paris employees, and is in full support of their demands.

On January 10th 2025, Starbreeze Management announced to all 23 employees of its french subsidiary Starbreeze Paris the start of a procedure aiming at closing this entity and laying off all of its staff. All of these workers were assigned to the studio’s games projects such as Payday2, Payday3, and the more recent project Baxter, just like Starbreeze employees in Stockholm.

This cessation of activity only exists in theory, as the swedish parent company is recreating similar positions in Stockholm. Starbreeze is comfortable with this strategy, and even proudly claimed in its Q4 2024 shareholders-aimed report that closing foreign subsidiaries will optimize the group’s market value. This decision was unilateral, discussions with Starbreeze Paris staff representatives were strictly limited to presenting a plan that was not up for discussion.

This decision is a dubious strategic move, losing the most technically competent personnel with years of expertise and accumulated company knowledge is hardly viable.
This decision shows total disrespect towards the affected employees that see their career come to a brutal halt : absolutely no compensation other than the bare legal minimum was offered, and management even refused to pay for arrears of employee expenses linked to the use of their personal space in an all-remote company.
This decision is illegal : the parent company Starbreeze AB, being the real employer of all 23 dismissed workers, did not stop any activity and shows culpable carelessness as it cannot justify the layoffs by anything else than aiming at lowering personnel cost to increase its profitability.

This kind of action has sadly become more frequent within the big companies of the video game industry, forgoing all respect towards those who create and build the games.

Ex-employees of Starbreeze Paris do not accept this state of affairs and in consequence have united and filed 17 complaints with the competent court in order to overturn these abusive layoffs.

With this example, we want to establish that the video game industry does not exist above the law. We strongly encourage other workers in the field to organize and fight for their rights in order to end this kind of practice.

This is a communication from our union section at Spiders.

On July 17, the COO and de facto director of Spiders announced a plan for layoffs. Presented to workers’ representatives the day before, it planned to fire 9 workers, exactly the number to, in theory, avoid having to negotiate with unions.

On August 18, after changes and talks with workers’ representatives, the « restructuration » plan at Spiders includes 7 layoffs and the overall cut of 25 jobs, which where either vacant at the time or which workers left voluntarily. These layoffs and cuts include the only UX/UI designer position, half of the managers in the Art and Design teams, the financial director position, nearly half of all environment artists and animators… These cuts add to the long list of workers leaving the company in the past year.

This layoffs plan has been prepared in secret and still lacks justification. A few months ago, Anne Devouassoux was still reassuring workers, looking them right in the eye, telling them not to worry even though it appears layoffs were already being planned. No one at the company, including managers, was informed of the layoffs more than a few days in advance. To this day, the company still refuses to communicate the details of this ongoing plan, even to the people at risk of being laid off !

On July 24, more than half of the workers at Spiders took part in meetings on Spiders’ future. These were organised in the context of a strike to demand the cancellation of the layoffs. The discussions proved, once again, that everybody is aware of Spiders’ problems and wants to change things, and has been for year. Sadly, workers are constantly refused the opportunity to do so, and instead continue to endure errors in management from Spiders and Nacon.

The value of a company lies in its workers, who are actually creating games. Laying them off is unacceptable and something which, considering the bad management, we oppose strongly. Workers at Spiders must not suffer from the ill-advised decisions of its COO and the Nacon group. Workers’ demands about the layoffs and the mismanagement of the studio, drawn up during the July 24 strike but similar to demands from the past years, have been sent the next day to management but are still waiting for an answer from the company.

Despite a harrowing production on GreedFall 2, and the cancellation of a promising project which finally brought necessary changes, Spiders’ workers are confident in their ability to create good games at Spiders. We hope that the COO and Nacon share the workers’ desire to make the company durable and the productions better. They will not prove it by treating workers this way, by laying them off and by degrading their working conditions, but by ceasing to create barriers to their work.

For the time being, you can help workers at Spiders by expressing your support, and by sending words of encouragement at . We ask you to please be polite and to not insult, harass or threaten anyone, at Nacon or at Spiders, our community manager colleagues have a hard enough job already.

Introduction

This letter is addressed to our direction at Arkane Studios, as well as the entities above, being the heads of Zenimax, Microsoft Gaming and the overall Microsoft group. It follows the call to Boycott Xbox products issued by BDS on April 10th, 2025, as well as the IOF Off Azure! Petition, and want to cast light on how this situation could affect our reputation and work, and ask Microsoft to take the appropriate measure to solve this issue.

The Genocide on Gaza and BDS

BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is a Palestinian led movement launched in 2005 to support the rights of Palestinians to live a normal life, and to be entitled to the same rights as anyone else.

Those rights have been denied for decades by the oppression, occupation and colonization of the Israeli regime. Moreover, during the last nineteen months, this colonization openly became a genocide. As of the writing of this letter, more than 60 000 people were recorded killed, at least 74% of which were civilians. The real number is likely much higher. 217 Journalists died according to the International Federation of Journalists, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists in the 21st century. While the palestinians are starving, the Israeli regime has been denying any humanitarian help to the Gazans for months now, trying to get control over it and how it would be distributed, against all international laws. Overall, Israeli policies and actions have been violating repetitively the international laws and treaties, promoting torture, violence, deportation and destruction.

In an attempt to fight back, the BDS movement has been, for years, issuing campaigns trying to focus the public attention to pressure government and companies to stop collaborating with the Israeli government. Thanks to their international network, those call to boycott have proven massive, and made companies yield multiple times. Even us, at Microsoft, have already been subject to a previous boycott in 2020, which proved successful and led to the withdrawal of Microsoft from AnyVision, an Israeli tech company specialized in facial recognition algorithm, which has been used to secretly keep Palestinians under surveillance.

Microsoft’s Xbox Boycott

On April 10th, 2025, BDS announced a new boycott campaign, targeting the Xbox gaming products, both hardware and software.

They chose to do so to cast light on how the Israeli military has been using Microsoft services to help out on its genocidal assault on Palestinian, as it’s been revealed by the Associated Press. Microsoft has continued, and reinforced, their collaboration with the Israeli military in the last years, providing both cloud services through their Azure service, as well as AI systems to accelerate and automate their crimes, which, as an example, have been revealed to be used to help define bombing targets. In a post on their blog, even Microsoft has been stating that “[…] Microsoft does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices.” For all those reasons, and a lot more, BDS chose to call for a massive boycott over Microsoft product, as they ask for Microsoft to stop supporting the Israeli military in their destruction of Palestine.

Support of IOF Off Azure Petition

In addition to that boycott, since May 2024, more than two thousand workers at Microsoft studios have signed the “No Azure for Apartheid” petition, demanding Microsoft to cut all their ties with the Israeli Army, as well as asking to have a third-party independent audit of our contract, services and product to make sure they are not involved in any human right violation, be it in Gaza, or elsewhere. But Microsoft have been turning a blind eye to demands from its own team. Even worst, multiple persons, trying to raise awareness of the situation in Gaza and Microsoft implication in it have been terminated.

Microsoft has a responsibility toward its employees, as we have one toward the company. As stated in the company’s commitment to human rights, and regularly used in the company talk points, “Microsoft is committed to protecting fundamental rights”. But so far, Microsoft has failed both its teams & its customers by being actively complicit of the invasion and war crimes happening in Gaza. If those « core values » are more then just a talking points to sell more products, it is now more than due time for Microsoft to commit to them.

We Demand that Microsoft takes their responsabilities and put an end to this.

Arkane Studios’ STJV section joins BDS and the No Azure for Apartheid in their demands for Microsoft to stop supporting the Israeli regime. We think that Microsoft has no place being accomplice of a genocide, and as Microsoft employees, we don’t want to be part of this sinister project for Gaza. Moreover, we think it’s our responsibility, as tech workers, to raise the alarm, and to ensure that our technologies are used to make the voices of the oppressed heard, and not facilitate their demise.
Finally, in a more direct manner, we think this could very well affect our life directly, by reducing the audience for our games, thus directly compromising the viability of Xbox Games, and, in the long run, our very own jobs.

In order to ensure the future of the Palestinian society, we join No Azure for Apartheid in their demands:

• Termination of all ongoing or future contract with Israeli Occupation Forces.
• Disclosing all ties to the Israeli military, as well as conducting a transparent, independent and public audit of Microsoft technologies, contracts, services and investments to make sure they are not used to violate the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, and Microsoft’s own Human Rights Statement, in Palestine or anywhere else.
• Calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
• Uphold free speech and ensure the protection of pro-Palestinian speech and the safety of allies employes, as well as any actions, fundraising initiatives on internal company platforms.

With publishers pushing more and more towards “live service games” / Games as a Service (games with a strong online component that tend to drive recurring spending under various forms of monetization), more and more players have come to know the disappointment of seeing one of their games become unplayable, one way or another. We could even describe those products as “exploitation services (🇫🇷)“, though it’d be a bit on-the-nose.

This “evolution” is both saddening and damaging for the player experience. For a while, what used to disappear were mere multiplayer modes, which could of course be very appreciated, but remained an addition to the main game experience (one could think of Metal Gear Online, for example). More recently, there was a quick degradation of service for games where the multiplayer component is important (for example, service deterioriations on Call of Duty games when the game’s publisher is still raking in profits from content sales).

Now, more and more, even content that was meant for solo play and that barely, if at all, benefits from online features, ends up being affected by arbitrary end of service, with a recent example in The Crew, which acted as a trigger for many to recognize the tendency we just described.

This is the context in which the Stop Killing Games initiative was started, with the goal of ending such practices. STJV supports the initiative, both because we believe it is entirely feasible to meet its demands, and because those demands are reasonable expectations from players and in the interest of games preservation.

In particular, we invite any person living in the European Union to sign the petition to the European Commission in order to promote the initiative and request the EU to push it into law.

As for why we support this initiative, here is our reasoning:

The initiative’s demands are feasible

The initiative as described in the European petition proposes a simple rule: a project must have an “exit plan” when they shut down the services. Does your studio make a solo game without online components? Congratulations, you have nothing to do. Does the game actually include online content? There’s a myriad of possibilities to explore – many of which have already been experimented on other projects, sometimes even in games viewed as classics. Here are a few of them:

• Keep the servers running if they’re not too costly (but we wouldn’t want to make a dent in EA’s CEO’s salary, poor soul!);
• Plan for content that doesn’t require online connection to remain playable after the servers close (as Ubisoft promised they would for the follow-up games to The Crew);
• Provide the necessary code to run one’s own server within the community, allowing those who want to keep playing online to do so on their own (see the appendix on City of Heroes below).

Those are only suggestions, and the initiative doesn’t aim at making any of those mandatory, but solely to require a solution to exist. On that topic, let’s dive into the disingenuous answer from Video Games Europe, the European lobby of video games publishers:

the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws

How gracious of them to respect the law, well deserving of praise. Good news: the initiative aims at having laws changed to fix the problem, so publishers will have their work cut out for them!

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option

This is why no one is saying that private servers should be the only solution expected of studios.

In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

This is insanity. This argument, which was repeated by unscrupulous commentators, is at best ignorant and at worst a bald-faced lie: if the law changes, companies adapt. The industry is constantly following legal or technological evolutions, why would things be different here?

As such, the publishers’ stance is completely indefensible. The initative doesn’t make revolutionary demands, and if those C-suit execs had spent a modicum of time asking their dev teams, they’d probably have been told that nothing is impossible and that solutions are definitely out there.

The demands are logical and legitimate

First of all, let’s ponder on the fact that this phenomenon of abandonned games is singular. It’s a riff on planned obsolescence that’s particularly agressive, with a perfectly functional product being destroyed remotely by the company that made it. If there are paralles to be drawn with the world of consumer electronics, where for example smartphones run out of update coverage, at least the object itself is left functional.

Under the guise of a digital economy that would get rid of the most basic rules of commerce because it’s different, this is once again pure disdain from publishers towards the audience and their clientele. As game developers, we would love nothing more than for the games we made to remain playable, but due to penny-pinching measures or a lack of care, projects end up discarded even as players wanted to keep playing the game they paid for. How would one feel about a cinema studio sneaking into one’s home to burn the Blu-Rays of their movies?

The Stop Killing Games campaign also brought back talks about video games preservation. In France, the BnF legal deposit of video games (🇫🇷). However that’s not a perfect solution: what use is it to safeguard physical versions of games if the publisher can make them useless by cutting off access to the servers it needs to run? Dozens of people devote their time to safeguarding ancient games that run on equally old hardware, but the challenge today is to face this new wave of degradations. At the turn of the millennium, the favored tech for online play was using community servers, which means many of those games can still run today even if the publisher has no more involvement with them. A quarter of a century later, the demands are merely to return to those good practices!

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