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.