On August 27th, following bitter negotiations, we at Quantic Dream signed an agreement for the ongoing redundancy plan (Plan de Sauvegarde de l’Emploi or PSE). In this tense context with an especially difficult social dialogue, we continue our annual mandatory negotiations (Négotiations Annuelles Obligatoires or NAO) which have been extremely disrupted or even paused by the redundancy plan. One element of those negotiations is « value sharing ».
Our main concern with this topic is a safeguarded budget of 6 million euros reserved for Quantic Dream employees in both Paris and Montréal. This amount was set aside following the purchase by NetEase in 2022 and was frozen to allow people joining the company later to receive a bonus linked to this purchase (people who were employed at that time received stock).
On August 5th, right in the middle of the redundancy plan, we had a « value sharing » negotiation. Together with Force Ouvrière, the other union present in the company, we voiced our request that this money be distributed this year, before the layoffs went into action. This makes complete sense: employees on all the company’s project will be laid off very soon. This budget was even presented as an upcoming bonus during some hiring interviews!
During this negotiation, management stated that they agreed with this request. They informed us that they would look into the banking operations required to gather the money and would come to us with a proposal.
Guillaume de Fondaumière, rends l’argent !
On September 10th, a month after the last meeting and two weeks after signing the redundancy plan agreement, we had a new meeting during which management changed its tone: they started explaining that the redundancy plan is now behind us, and we have to move on. Very kind words for the workers who have not yet lost their job and to the teams concerned about their future.
Management, beaming, claims that the previous meeting’s content was nothing but inconsequential discussion, and that they did not have a mandate at that point to negotiate the topic. There’s only one way to sum up their contempt: they’re taking the piss.
Management then explains being fully against using this money in 2026 before the layoffs. They consider that the people losing their jobs are already being compensated very generously, and remaining employees working on Star Wars Eclipse need further incentives. As if keeping your job was not incentive enough in an industry butchered by the mistakes of our studios’ leadership.
The proposed plan is now to distribute this budget after Star Wars Eclipse comes out, in case it makes significant profit, to the people still within the company. What happens if the project fails? If the ccompany closes for lack of support from NetEase? If there is a new redundancy plan? We deem it necessary to motivate the troops now, instead of attempting to dangle a hypothetical carrot that already leaves many people out.
It’s the same old song, played by all company executives: a purposefully unreachable goal, so money never get redistributed to workers.
Faced with this stern refusal by management to even discuss the topic, we slammed the door on the negotiation process. If management refuses to negotiate the topics they are not interested it, it is time for this to stop.
For exemple, we had two main requests for the « work time » annual mandatory negotiation: lower work hours (we are the only French videogame company working 40 hours a week by default), and securing remove work for the future via an agreement. Management steadily refused to discuss those topics. At Quantic Dream, this is called « peaceful social dialog ».
Violence has two faces
As a total coincidence, 6 million euros is also the amount that Guillaume de Fondaumière personally received when the studio was sold. We understand his frustration that David « Cage » de Gruttola got a better deal, pocketing thirteen times (!) more money adding up to 80 million euros. This is not a reason to avoid distributing money back to workers. Contrast that to the fact that we are told that layoffs were unavoidable for lack of money… In total, over 100 million euros were distributed in 2022, and we are told the last 6 millions will have to wait another couple years. It’s simply unacceptable.
On the next day, during a meeting aiming to remotivate the troops, Guillaume de Fondaumière took it upon himself to criticise our union communications with only the merest plausible deniability, deeming them violent. The manageriale bourgeoisie will always find it normal to push our colleagues out the door, and call any resistance « violent ». A few employees fed up by impulsive management and daring to react with a clown emoji is not true violence. True violence is communications from management where they blame Spellcasters’ failure on the teams, ungrateful swine that they are for failing to thank their bosses for giving them work (before firing them in cold blood).
Guillaume de Fondaumière expresses the wish that each and everyone may work peacefully inside the studio. A small bit of advice: distributing the money owed to the workers and avoiding regular insults to them in the company’s communications would be a first step towards that. That’s without even considering the layoffs: who can work in peace in a company where you might get fired at any time?
We have only one thing to tell Guillaume de Fondaumière : respect is earned, not decreed. As long as the managerial circus does not stop, workers will be angry. Whether or not we’re here, as long as you continue your unfair actions, they will be rightfully outraged. This is made worse by the double speak from NetEase, our sole shareholder: during the redundancy plan they were very close to closing the studio, two weeks later they have our back without reserve. How can we trust Quantic Dream’s management when they contradict themselves so?
At Quantic Dream, crunch is part of company culture. Every project’s final push has been especially difficult and every worker in the studio dreads the phase to come. It’s only logical that they feel wronged by inconsequential, violent leadership. It has to stop now.
Management must pay for its disgraceful acts
For all these reasons, and to make ourselves heard by this manegement that never misses a beat, we call for a renewable strike starting Tuesday, September 15th.
Our demands are as follows:
for management to finally pay out the 6 millions fund to eligible employees, before the redundancy plan layoffs are applied;
for management to reduce our work hours without lowering pay;
for management to cease its contemptuous communication towards employees;
for management to stop its constant union discrimination and its systemic defamation, failing which we will take all necessary legal measures.
Our strike fund is still open to support the current movement and the ones to come. It will allow money to be redistributed to strikers to blunt the financial consequences as much as possible. We encourage you to spread it far and wide.
We had warned that we would surrender nothing: case in point. We will fight as long as we have to against Guillaume de Fondaumière, David « Cage » de Gruttola, and the entirety of this clique that despises us so much.
Since the 20th of May, 2026, the Quantic Dream union section has been fighting the best it can to defend the company’s employees from a despicable layoff plan targeting a quarter of the workforce.
We held on, through sham negotiations, pressure from all directions, threats, coercion, and were finally in a position to sign an agreement on Thursday, August 27th 2026. We can neither celebrate nor call this agreement a victory. The plan initially laid out by leadership was nothing short of insulting and unfair, in comparison, we have made huge progress thanks to the tireless mobilisations of our comrades and colleagues.
We will cover the detailed history of this eventful period, but we will first cover the measures we secured compared to the ones initially proposed.
Summary of measures secured
Measure
Leadership proposal
After negotiations
Extra-legal compensation (forced departure)
5 000 €
35 000 €
Extra-legal compensation (voluntary departure)
10 000 €
35 000 €
Job-seeking bonus
1 000 €
5 000 € in European France 7 000 € in DROM-COM (Overseas France) and abroad
Relocation bonus
1 500€
5 000 € in European France 10 000 € in DROM-COM (Overseas France) and abroad
Company creation or takeover bonus
10 000€
10 000€ 15 000€ per worker, for companies created by several laid-off workers
Company creation training bonus
1 500€
5 000€
We were able to secure many additional benefits as compared to the original proposal:
A training budget for those who would look for a job. This is a legally mandated benefit that was not even present in the initial plan:
3000 € for VAE (validation of professional experience),
8000 € for adaptation training,
12000 € for career change training;
Pooling of the budget for all the measures (making it possible for individuals to obtain more than the maximum if the budget allows it);
Repayment of student loans for workers under 36yo, up to 5000 €;
When laid off as part of a redundancy plan, salaried workers have the option to enter a specific framework called CSP (contrat de sécurisation professionnelle – professional safeguarding contract). If the person has worked at least a year in the company, they receive the ASP (allocation de sécurisation professionnelle – professional safeguarding benefit), worth 75% of their gross salary. If they have worked less than a year in the company, they receive the ARE (allocation de retour à l’emploi – « return to employment » benefit, no comment), worth 57% of their gross salary. We secured the commitment that the company will pay for the difference between the two for employees with less than a year of seniority;
Payment of the remainder of the accompanying measures’ budget to workers after the 12 months of CSP;
Reinforced measures for precarious workers (+30% on training fees), we were also able to greatly widen the definition of said workers;
25 substitution departures (through which a person can choose to join the redundancies even if in a professional category that is not targeted for layoffs if someone in a targeted category can take over their position);
20 solidarity departures (through which a person can choose to join the redundancies even if in a professional category that is not targeted for layoffs in order to save someone else’s position who would have been laid off);
Payment of all strike days;
Guaranteed mention of all laid off workers in the game’s credits;
Payment of stocks that depended on the person still being on staff at the end of December.
Limits of the agreement
We must however point out that, while we signed the agreement, we still consider it to be unsatisfactory on several points.
In particular, we firmly believe that the plan will not improve the company’s situation because management, by their own admission, is unable to plan ahead for anything. We spent three months asking what the organisation will look like post-layoffs, and management never provided a proper answer.
« The staffing plan changes nearly every day » is what they said. We are not surprised by the difficulties encountered throughout Star Wars Eclipe’s development when Guillaume de Fondaumière is unable to organise the company and when David « Cage » de Gruttola changes his mind every day as Creative Director.
The expert report points to these issues as well: it shows that, at every level of the company, a culture of « iteration » is pushed to the extreme and causes psycho-social risks to a large majority of the workers. This culture « is part of the studio’s DNA » according to management. So are crunch and burn-out, it seems. Rather than facing the music, management is looking for any way possible to avoid paying the firm hired for the audit, and is requesting highly specific personal information on each of its employees, in hopes of challenging the profession they practice.
Much in the same way, some mandatory documents were never delivered to the CSE (works council), to union organisations, or to the DRIEETS (labour inspectorate) even after they demanded said documents. Does management have anything to hide regarding its organisational incompetence?
In the absence of any vision for the company’s future, or documents that would show any form of sustainability, the CSE issued a negative opinion. As union section, we agree with their analysis: Spellcasters Chronicles and Star Wars Eclipse have gone through chaotic development periods and this is not set to improve as if by magic, quite the opposite. The former Spellcasters teams have now spent over three months with no work assigned to them, which constitutes a gross failure of the company’s obligations. Between this and the growing risk of layoffs to the Star Wars teams, we believe it is illusory to expect working conditions to be even acceptable within the company. Watching colleagues get laid off, or decimated teams unable to meet the other teams’ needs, will inevitably create tensions, which we regret in advance.
With all of these facts laid out, management denies the existence of any psycho-social risks and believes the expert report to be biased in favor of the workers. Worse yet, management blames the experts for not doing the tasks it should have done itself, especially regarding the transfer of workloads (from laid-off people to the remaining workers). This is yet another proof that they are making it up as they go. Not much of a surprise, seeing as David « Cage » de Gruttola compared himself to Christopher Columbus during a recent team meeting…
And when management does produce the required documents, their quality leaves a lot to be desired: we received a benchmark that supposedly proved that Eclipse would sell well enough to pay off the colossal debt currently owed to NetEase. It merely pointed to a dozen of successful games with nothing in common outside of selling well, with a few words explaining why they’re similar to Star Wars Eclipse. This document even magically excludes Star Wars games that underperformed. Are we to trust such shoddy work?
Another major roadblock is the definition of professional categories. They were first established in a blatantly illegal manner in order to specifically target the former Spellcasters Chronicles teams. While those categories were then modified, that only happened during the very last week before the deadline to sign the agreement… Unfortunately, we were not able to make them match the jurisprudential definition. Since our goal was to limit forced departures, we aimed at making it as easy as possible for those who wanted to leave to be eligible.
Out of the current 95 positions being removed, including 91 layoffs and 4 positions left vacant, that amounts to:
24 people being transferred internally;
91 potential voluntary departures for the impacted positions (with the final number being lower in all likelihood);
25 substitution departures;
20 solidarity departures.
We hope to keep forced departures to a minimum thanks to voluntary ones and internal transfers. As we polled workers, we identified a number of them who suffered under the current state of things and wished to leave on their own terms: this is what encouraged us in this direction.
Do note as well that despite what management said, there was no reduction in the number of positions being made redundant.
With all of that said, why did we sign in the end? This is a valid question. First of all, we took into account that management could have chosen to force things through and that it would have been detrimental to the workers. Management said it multiple times during negotiations: they intended to only comply with the bare minimum as laid out by the DRIEETS, which would have doubly penalised those being laid off. In one of the worst cases, they would have reduced the extra-legal compensation by 20 000 €, lowering it to 15 000 €.
The other reason is coercion and the incessant disloyalty of the negotiations. We will lay these elements down in detail below.
History of a brutal redundancy plan
On the 20th of May, 2026, without warning, management announced a redundancy plan, to lay off 1 in 4 workers on financial grounds at Quantic Dream in France, and two dozens workers in Montreal.
As the majority union in the company, we tried to hold normal negotiations (i.e. making proposals and awaiting counter-proposals, instead of just being told “no” every time and for every thing). Yet management called our method of negotiation “perverse” and even “fascist”… Coming from a company who tried to censor a poster against fascism from our union display board, that’s rich. Nonetheless, it’s a good example of the aggressive tone that has been employed by the company during these 3 months of negotiations.
Company communications in the shape of generalised harassment
We weren’t the only ones getting insulted by management. Our colleagues were also directly subjected to it. Instead of communicating openly and with compassion while accounting for the difficulty of losing one’s job in an industry where recruitment has basically stopped, Guillaume de Fondaumière and David « Cage » de Gruttola chose to harass workers with vile emails. Chosen excerpts:
Guillaume de Fondaumière accused the work council of creating psycho-social risks, because worker representatives informed workers of the content of the redundancy plan, instead of keeping them in the dark. He even went as far as threatening worker representatives with legal action, in front of the whole company! These threats were repeated to the point of harassment via a second email from Guillaume de Fondaumière, and another – extremely aggressive toward the representatives – from David « Cage » de Gruttola.
In the same email, management said they were open to applications from workers willing to be transferred inside the company. By acting in this rushed fashion, they tried to pull the rug from under worker representatives and unions; this also created an atmosphere of uncertainty, misunderstanding and stress among workers, who didn’t even know yet if they were at risk of being laid off.
Just 9 days after the redundancy plan was announced, David “Cage” de Gruttola sent a very long email to the whole company to complain about their “ingratitude” and deny any responsibility for the state of the company. His ego couldn’t bear being the target of the workers’ anger – workers who, deservedly, blamed Spellcasters’ failure on the Creative Direction he is heading. Later, we would even learn that management considers that Spellcasters’ failure is mostly due to workers not working fast enough… who is to blame, when we are led by weather vanes who cannot stick to their own decisions? He went on to explain that Eclipse was an « exceptional » game, and that the soon-to-be laid off workers should be grateful for the opportunity to have worked at Quantic Dream. Such contempt is truly nauseating, even more so when workers were still in shock from the redundancy plan being announced.
After that, David « Cage » de Gruttola, seemingly caring little about the ongoing productions and the company’s administration, started regularly sending the Eclipse teams messages claiming that everything was going well, even as defiance was rising within the company. He never spared a word for the people possibly getting laid off or the Spellcasters teams, showing his disdain for them.
Guillaume de Fondaumière went on an email spree hallucinating imaginary agreements that the STJV had signed (according to him) at Spiders, comparing Quantic Dream to Don’t Nod to justify offering terms that were much worse than those of a company in a dire situation, criticising the cost of the expert firm mandated by the CSE (even though they cost way less than an executive at a company the size of Quantic Dream), lying about the documents they actually provided (some of which we never received, despite the DRIEETS demanding them)… He even went as far as commenting on our union action, which constitutes a characterised illegal impediment, he criticised press articles, the strike and the striking workers…All of that without showing a lick of compassion for the people he was firing in cold blood.
Two months into the process, Guillaume de Fondaumière finally acted as if he would answer the workers’ questions. He allowed them only three days to ask their questions during a holiday period… before largely rewriting the questions without the senders’ permission. The answers are a muddy mishmash written hastily and mixes legal elements of dubious relevance with thinly veiled criticisms of unions. In it, management spends more time trying to claw back its public image than answering the workers’ very real worries. This marked the one and only time where workers received « answers » from management.
Progress up until the last minute, thanks to mobilised workers
After several unproductive meetings during which we had to give impromptu lessons on labour regulations to a management team that was shockingly ignorant on the topic, we called for a national strike on June 25th, 2026. The strike and the media coverage that followed forced management to start ceding ground: right after that, they sent a long email explaining to workers that they were in a position of power… while beginning to open up to our demands. This timing was not a coincidence: every time many workers mobilised on strikes, our demands went forward, especially at the end of the process where a week-long renewable strike allowed us to make drastic progress.
We wish to thank our colleagues who braved the crushing heat, didn’t give up even with fatigue accumulating, or showed up even during the holiday period, those who followed us every Thursday afternoon to walk out during the last three months. Mobilisation was strong, with around a hundred or more people from all projects present during these strikes, which represents a quarter of the company showing up reliably, at the studio or remotely. This collective strength allowed us to keep pushing through and to make it to the end.
We regret that the STJV was the only union to push for workers to exert their collective power, a power that ultimately was the reason we achieved any progress in favor of the laid-off workers. Force Ouvrière’s union section and it’s CSE-elected members explicitly refused to join the strikes, and even sent out demotivating communication to workers.
It should also be noted that, while the STJV is the company’s majority union, we lost a number of elected members in the CSE during the current cycle. We did not align with the majority of the remaining elected members of the CSE, which limited our ability to challenge management on matters like professional categories. Let us also remind everyone that the CSE was threatened and reduced to silence by management from the very start of the process.
We made great progress at the end, and we even hoped negotiations would finally be peaceful, but that did not happen. As cherries on the cake go, the last negotiation meeting was not one. Instead of securing a proper time slot, management invited the negotiators to a « final read » over a mere hour, therefore exerting heavy pressure to sign the agreement exactly as they presented it, even as we still had unanswered demands. We held strong, and succeeded in making the agreement evolve a lot more despite the constant pressure.
Just to give a clearer view of how things unfolded:
On Sunday, the FO union section posted a message on the company’s communications tools to inform workers that they considered the agreement to be perfectly fine as-is;
On Monday, Guillaume de Fondaumière sent an email to the whole company which explained for the first time in the several months of the process how negotiations went, and explicitely threatened that the most favourable elements of the deal would be removed if we did not sign it;
On Tuesday morning, as we spoke to the assembled workers to kick off the strike during the last negotiations day (or « final read »…), members of the CSE told workers that NetEase threatened to close Quantic Dream outright if we did not sign the agreement;
Management made the same threat an hour later during the meeting, by reading a very explicit email from NetEase on that topic.
We considered that if this threat was indeed real and not a twisted negotiating strategy, it was management’s duty to give in to our demands to make it possible to sign the agreement. We were proven right, since we secured actual progress even during this « final read », on voluntary departures in particular.
Conclusion and looking forward
Many management teams have had the brilliant idea of selling their studio to contemptuous groups, so they can buy a new manor and a few luxury cars, if not dignity. The impact has been remarkable: studio closures (Spiders, Big Bad Wolf, Midgar Studio…), hundreds of jobs destroyed (Kylotonn, Quantic Dream…), and now direct threats to the continued existence of Quantic Dream. All of this while production budgets balloon upwards, work conditions degrade, and the quality of produced games drops. It is simply impossible to keep a job in good conditions… While employers twist their brains to try and explain that union actions destroy jobs, we stress once more that it is in fact their incompetence and their choices that drive our companies head-first into a wall.
At Quantic Dream we refused to fold, from the start to the end of the process. When management explained that NetEase – its sole shareholder, which brought in a net profit of over 5 BILLIONS dollars in 2025 – was forcing its financial hand, we explained that we would never sign an agreement that did not account for this, and repeatedly forced the layoff budget to be negotiated upwards.
Constant mobilisation throughout the company has been key, proving the importance of union action. We had to do management’s job in its stead by keeping our coworkers updated about the process, the state of negotiations, departure conditions, legal processes… Meanwhile, the management team was actively trying to keep employees afraid and in the dark.
Even if we cannot possibly treat a redundancies agreement as a victory, we want the conditions of said agreement to serve as an inspiration to workers at other companies and become a bare minimum standard that any employer drafting a redundancy plan in the video game industry has to respect.
We also send warm thoughts to our comrades in Montréal, where two dozens of our coworkers were laid off back in July. Canadian worker protections are much weaker, making the situation there a lot more complicated: while we do not legally represent those workers, we support them wholeheartedly. We encourage video game workers to unionise and defend their rights regardless of their country, their citizenship, their trade, their status or their employer.
We will continue to fight inside Quantic Dream, both to secure decent working conditions and to force management to finally have a true company strategy, beyond NetEase and the release of Star Wars Eclipse, which can ensure that the studio keeps existing after the current project.
With worker solidarity and our colleagues’ tireless support, we will surrender nothing in our work to improve this industry.
Our comrades’ fight against a layoffs plan at Quantic Dream is still going on, and its developments are not over yet. As the end of negociations is near, our union section raises the alarm about the many irregularities in the processus.
Abuse against worker representatives
As we said in our last article, the studio’s executives seem to have a creative reading of the law: they imposed illegal deadlines, forced to keep terms that will not hold up under the labour administration’s examination… nothing to inspire confidence. Even more, they wasted half of the negociation time (6 weeks over a total of 3 months) to discuss the terms of negotiation. For those not familiar with “social dialogue”, these terms are the basis of every negotiation : they define the means, the calendar and the methods of negotiation. It guarantees that negotiations take place correctly, and is obviously crucial when 100 jobs are threatened.
It is sadly not all. Quantic Dream’s executives do not seem to understand that “social dialogue” includes “dialogue”. They refused to provide necessary documents by claiming that negotiators would “corrupt” them – whatever that means, they claimed our comrades were resorting to “fascist methods” (as we only asked for the law to be respected, the French Republic will like the insult), or kept banging on about how “the press should not be read, as it is just a pack of lies”. Without even going into what this says about the studio executives’ personalities, it is impossible to correctly negotiate layoffs when the company resorts to insults and violence at every step.
We also cannot go over the fact the our delegates formulated many propositions and demands, all along the negotiations, which the executives mostly ignored for the 4 meetings. During one of the last meetings, the company did not say a single word about the propositions that were made more than a week before. Is this the kind of diligence and respect that should be expected from our bosses when they want to lay off 115 workers?
Malicious intent and greed
It is clear that Quantic Dream’s management wants to limit itself to doing the bare minimum. When the company is affected neither by a weak market (which is doing fine, regardless of what bosses say) nor by a lack of worker motivation (their struggle shows how much they want to save their jobs and their work), it is normal to offer decent layoff conditions to help those who will lose their job just because their bosses decided so. At Quantic Dream, this is not the case. At every meeting, the company executives, and especially Guillaume de Fondaumière, simply didn’t listen. They showed that they only want to go as low as possible, forgetting that they are legally bound to conduct loyal negotiations, not turn them into a farce.
This third-rate money-grubbing translate into actions that are beyong understanding. For instance, the company is complaining about the training costs for laid-off workers, seemingly forgetting that it is a legal obligation. It is never enjoyable to pay one’s debts, so we would like Quantic Dream to share with us its magic trick to be exempted from it.
It is worth noting that Quantic Dream is a subsidiary of NetEase, a group which is doing really fine, and as such is able to offer more than decent layoff packages to the victims of its management. But their constant quest for more stinginess leads to an absurd situation, in which the executives’ offer would be less than what our comrades won at Don’t Nod, a company with way less financial support. It is disgusting to end up in this situation. If Quantic Dream wants to destroy jobs, it must pay.
What about the workers ?
Finally, we would like to talk about how the company is mistreating its employees. They suffer from the uncertainty created by this dubious plan, which will surely go into extra time. The psychosocial risks linger on even more as our comrades have no means to communicate clearly with workers, after executives cut off their legally-acquired rights to do so. Out of sight, out of mind?
We must also call out the gruesome fate set aside for the teams which worked on Spellcasters Chronicles. After their work was brutally unplugged earlier this year, the company sidelined them and stopped giving them work, for two months now. We must remind everyone that a work contract binds a worker, who rents its working force to an employer, who is under the obligation of giving them work. Before terminating contracts, Quantic Dream should first fulfil their most basic obligations.
To finish up with how workers’ fears are taken into consideration: while executives are trying to prevent worker representatives from communicating with workers about the ongoing negotiations, they do not hesitate to spread lies among the company. Over the past months, they never admitted to any of their failures, even the most obvious ones. On the contrary, David “Cage” de Gruttola congratulated himself about how lucky the soon-to-be laid off workers were to work on the game, as if working around him was a great privilege. Is this how one respects those who create the value exploited by the company?
Quantic Dream, criminal antics
We should make a slight digression: the ongoing procedure stops at the border, but we shall not forget our colleagues in Montreal, who are affected by around twenty layoffs as well. The (relative, as outlined in this article) protection offered by French law is not extended to them, although their situation is very similar to ours. We express our support and solidarity toward them. They deserve the same respect as workers in France.
This negotiation risks being just an act from executives who decided to do whatever they want, and only performed the “social dialogue” rather than actually listening to workers’ propositions. Our union section will fight until the end to ensure that Quantic Dream workers are respected and that, if the lose their jobs, it comes with decent compensation. This has been our message to the company from the first day of negotiations, and we stick to it.
We speak to every person who hindered these negotiations (they know who they are): if you do not respect the law when asked, you will suffer the consequences. We will defend our comrades and worker’s right to have dignified lives through their labour, whatever it will cost us.
Finally, to show off our determination and unity, we call for an open-ended strike at Quantic Dream starting on Wednesday, August 5th. We condemn the shameful attitude of the company during these negotiations. We demand an extension to the negotiations and, at the very least, that the propositions from worker representatives be included in the layoffs plan.
The exceptional disastrous situation in the video games industry calls for an exceptional response. Everything points to the French video game industry being in a critical situation. We refuse to let this situation play out without taking action. One month after our national strike on May 27th, the situation hasn’t gotten any better, and even more jobs are under threat. More than 1,000 jobs have already been destroyed or threatened, meaning more than 1,000 lives are permanently impacted.
An avoidable situation, an irresponsible leadership
After years of warnings about particularly difficult working conditions, and after securing convictions against numerous companies for their illegal activities and shortcomings, studio closures and layoff plans are now multiplying in France and abroad. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking these factors are unrelated.
The failure of our leaders to train and retain a skilled workforce, their repeated abuse against workers, their deep-seated stance against unions, their incompetence in project management, and their inability to listen to warnings have all directly led to the current situation. This crisis was avoidable, but our bosses chose to drive blindly towards disaster.
The government is equally culpable. By subsidizing an industry with questionable practices without any oversight, it encouraged a harmful and unsustainable economic and social system, potentially leading today to the collapse of the country’s leading cultural sector.
Executives claim this is just a rough patch and that the crisis will eventually pass, without actually trying to do anything to stop it. Whatever happens, there are workers for whom this will have grave consequences. Meanwhile bosses, many of which have amassed millions in recent years, will continue to lounge in their mansions with indoor pools, even if their studios are shut-down.
The health consequences of losing one’s job are particularly significant. And the workers who remain face increasingly degraded working conditions and are not immune to losing their jobs in the months and years to come. With AI lurking in the shadows and the increased use of outsourcing (whether local through undeclared work or abroad), there is no doubt that working conditions and employment will continue to deteriorate if we remain passive in front of increasingly short-sighted companies.
We know that this situation will only repeat itself and even worsen if habits and processes are not fundamentally changed. Workers must have a voice so that management stops imposing foolish and harmful decisions that lead to the predictable failure of projects, which endangers workers. Democracy must prevail in the workplace.
National mobilization on June 25 in support of the workers at Quantic Dream
For all these reasons, the STJVis calling for a strike across the entire video game sector on Thursday, June 25, to organize and unite in the fight against the ongoing layoffs and to demand major organizational changes within their companies, and giving significant weight to democracy and collective decision-making.
Layoffs will not save the video game industry, quite the opposite. It is essential that bosses, journalists, public authorities, and elected officials become aware of the catastrophic, predictable, and avoidable situation facing the video game industry today. This date is just the first in a large-scale mobilization to come.
Quantic Dream is currently undergoing the largest layoff plan in the french industry since Blizzard in 2018, which plans to destroy 115 jobs, representing a quarter of the company’s workforce in France. This is in addition to several dozen layoffs already confirmed at the Montreal studio. Meanwhile, working conditions continue to deteriorate within the company, with open overtime, without any accountability for the executives. We cannot accept this. We reaffirm our commitment to saving studios by fundamentally changing their outdated practices.
A picket line will be held starting at 9:30 AM in front of Quantic Dream, at 30 Rue Raoul Wallenberg, 75019 Paris. We call on all workers, regardless of their employer, status, or location, to come together to share, discuss, and organize. Faced with the uncertainty of our futures, let’s stand together to show our unity and solidarity and demand improvements.
We remind you that this call to action covers the scope of the STJV in the private sector, and therefore concerns anyone employed by a video game company, be it publishing, distribution, services, and/or production, regardless of their position or status and regardless of their company’s area of activity (games, consoles, mobile, serious games, VR/AR, game engines, marketing services, streaming, merchandise, esports, online content creation, etc.), as well as all teachers working in private schools in video game-related programs. Since this is a national strike call, no specific action is required to participate: you can simply not show up to work.
We will communicate further details on future actions at a later date. Summer has only just begun, and it’s going to be hot!
Consultation of the CSE (elected workers’s representatives) and negotiations with unions are going on at Quantic Dream. As is apparently customary for our C-suites clowns, David de Gruttola (known as David Cage) and Guillaume de Fondaumière are doing everything they can to stop worker representatives (CSE and unions) from… representing workers.
After revoking the CSE’s access to the studio’s internal mailing lists (in violation of established usage), preventing it from communicating properly with employees, they now oppose giving sufficient time and means of communication to our negotiation delegation.
We must correct what was previously announced: their redundancy does not plan for the destruction of 95, but 115 jobs. Being over the legal threshold of 100, the consultation period of the CSE should last 3 months, not 2. However, Quantic executives fail to explain how and why they are imposing a duration of 2 months for the procedure at hand, in our opinion in violation of law.
Pretending to rely on “social dialogue” on one hand, and making it impossible on the other: we know the drill. It didn’t work at Don’t Nod, it will not work for Quantic. Since they only understand power struggle, let’s keep mobilizing to save our jobs!
Last Thursday, over a hundred colleagues walked out a second time to protest against this despicable redundancy plan. David de Gruttola himself came around the picket line for a dozen minutes. Intimidation technique? We doubt he came in solidarity with the striking workers and those who risk losing their job…
Cachez ce Code que je ne saurais voir
This redundancy plan is not only despicable, but also symptomatic of the studio heads’ utter disdain for the law, as they are not even doing the minimum to comply with the basic requirements of such a plan. While they pretend to do everything they can to save Star Wars Eclipse, they directly and explicitly target individual workers on Spellcasters. How? By completely distorting the legal concept of “catégories professionnelles”.
In a french redundancy plan (PSE), jobs are cut among “catégories professionnelles”, without knowing beforehand the individual workers who will be affected. Inside each category, individual criteria (“critères d’ordre”) will then be evaluated to rank workers and determine who gets laid off.
For Quantic’s executives however, a person’s “catégorie professionnelle” is defined by the project they’re working on, not their trade. They make-believe that absolutely unique working tools and methods are in use on each project, supposedly unusable outside of it. According to them, workers on Spellcasters would be incapable of working on Star Wars Eclipse without going through a lenghty training of more than 6 months, and vice versa. Thus, they are implying that workers would also be incapable of working on other video game projects outside of Quantic Dream.
This is absolutely ridiculous. But if we were to take it seriously, it means that the company is admitting to violating the French labour laws. Indeed, French employers have an obligation of maintaining their workers’ ability to work in their field, including in other companies, via continuous training. And Quantic is explicitely saying it did not oblige on this matter.
This is further enforced by the “pre-information letter” sent by french labour inspection administration, during the redundancy plan at Don’t Nod in 2024. We will not attempt to translate this as it is written with precise intent and french legalese.
La notion de catégorie professionnelle renvoie à des notions de compétence, et non d’organisation ou de classification. La notion de catégorie professionnelle correspond à l’ensemble des salariés qui exercent au sein de l’entreprise des fonctions similaires, supposant une formation professionnelle commune et ne nécessitant pas une formation complémentaire excédant l’obligation d’adaptation (Cass. soc. 18 mai 2011, n° 10-13.618 ; Cass. soc, 23 septembre 2015, n° 13-28.558 ; CE, 30 mai 2016, n° 387798).
Une fonction de même nature ne doit pas être interprétée comme une identité de poste, ni comme un statut général tel que cadre, ouvrier ou agent de maîtrise, mais comme une fonction présentant des degrés de responsabilités similaires, nécessitant un bagage de connaissances professionnelles communes.
Si la caractérisation de l’appartenance à une même catégorie professionnelle peut tenir compte des acquis de l’expérience professionnelle pour apprécier l’existence d’une formation professionnelle commune, c’est toutefois à la condition, notamment, que de tels acquis équivalent à une formation complémentaire qui excède l’obligation d’adaptation qui incombe à l’employeur.
This redundancy plan could only be rejected by the administration, which will control the “catégories professionnelles” and understand that the plan largely contravenes labour law and jurisprudence:
En cas de document unilatéral, l’administration doit notamment vérifier que l’élaboration des catégories relève d’une logique de compétences professionnelles et non d’une logique basée sur d’autres considérations telles que l’organisation de l’entreprise, l’ancienneté des intéressés ou s’il apparaît qu’une ou plusieurs catégories ont été définies dans le but de permettre le licenciement de certains salariés pour un motif inhérent à leur personne ou en raison de leur affectation sur un emploi ou dans un service dont la suppression est recherchée. L’administration doit en outre s’assurer qu’il n’y a pas d’intention de la part de l’employeur de procéder à un ciblage des salariés ou d’un service.
Dans le cadre d’un accord majoritaire, l’administration doit s’assurer que les catégories sont exemptes de tout caractère discriminatoire. La validation sera ainsi refusée si une catégorie professionnelle repose l’un des motifs discriminatoires prévus par l’article L. 1132-1 du code du travail, par exemple le sexe ou l’âge.
Les choix effectués pour la définition des catégories professionnelles devront pouvoir être justifiés, l’autorité administrative devant s’assurer de l’absence de toute rupture d’égalité entre des personnes se trouvant dans des situations identiques.
The studio’s management boasts about drawing up this plan in 5 days. Most likely with the help of a genius writer such as David de Gruttola. Unless it was written with help from ChatGPT? The company is indeed saying that the jobs destroyed could be replaced with subcontractors… or “generative AI”.
What we want
During negotiations, Guillaume de Fondaumière tried to convince us that a redundancy package of 5 000 or 10 000€ was better than what we obtained at Don’t Nod, which is to say at least 13 000€ with additional financial allowances for training, career change, moving out…
It appears that Quantic Dream’s executives are struggling with basic mathematics.
Quantic Dream isn’t in a dire economic situation. They like to brag about their back catalogue, which is supposedly very profitable. The company is also owned by NetEase, an international group reaping billions of dollars in benefits each quarter.
Our demands are simple, and they are just:
Applying the 3 months legal consultation period of the redundancy plan ;
Re-establishing the CSE’s access to the mailing lists ;
Giving sufficient delegation hours and means of communication so our union delegation can do its work ;
Re-assigning the workers on Spellcasters to Star Wars Eclipse, as the project is in dire need of reinforcements ;
If the company were able to prove that it needs to reduce its staff, opening voluntarily leave to everyone instead of doing layoffs ;
Reorganization of the studio’s creative direction team ;
Direct involvement of all workers in decision-making for the company and the production of Star Wars Eclipse.
Conclusion
What they’re trying to enforce is a brutal redundancy plan : a AAA PSE. But a discount one.
We fear the horrible consequences this plan would cause for the company, and moreover for the workers, if it where to come to life. The after-effects of a similar plan at Don’t Nod are deep and many, and the current state of the studio does not reassure us in the least.
If they persist with their plan, Quantic executives will have no choice other than to rework its “catégories professionnelles”, as Don’t Nod did in its time. Reworking them implies that all workers at the company could be affected. As the labour inspector justly said, these categories cannot be based on the company structure.
By pretending it could simply layoff Spellcasters’ team, they are lying and trying to divide workers.
In any case, Star Wars Eclipse’s production will be affected. Voices from all hierarchy levels are already denouncing the development hell this project has found itself into. Whether they like it or not, David de Gruttola and Guillaume de Fondaumière have crossed the Rubicon.
It is their responsibility to stand by the consequences, not ours.
