By Brendyn Creamer | The Coast
A unionization effort started as a way to avoid mass layoffs has ended with just that.
Seventy-one workers at Ubisoft Halifax are without jobs after the international video game corporation shut down the studio days after 61 members of their staff joined CWA Canada Local 30111, the first union within Ubisoft’s North American operations. Their unionization was certified on Dec. 18. On Jan. 7, workers were pulled into a town hall to be told that the studio was shutting down.
“It was obvious that this was a surprise to everybody,” says Jon Huffman, a lead programmer at Ubisoft Halifax. “It wasn’t just a surprise to the members of the union and the employees. It was a surprise to our leadership team, as well, so this was certainly something that blindsided us.”
In a statement provided to CityNews, Ubisoft says the decision was made in its efforts to restructure the company, which it says began two years ago.Huffman worked at the studio for just over four years and was one of the employees organizing to join a union. These efforts started in 2024, according to Huffman, soon after Microsoft closed Xbox-affiliated game studio Alpha Dog Games, another Halifax-based game developer, in a mass-layoff campaign that May.
“It kind of prompted one of our organizing members to reach out to Game Workers Unite and see if they had any advice on organizing,” says Huffman.
While the video game industry is rampant with poor worker conditions, including extreme overtime, low pay and burnout, Huffman says these were never issues within Ubisoft Halifax. Their main concern was mass layoffs, which can often come without warning in the video game industry, even if companies are reporting massive profits.
“Where most efforts are indeed led by discontentment and concerns over working conditions, we were unique in the fact that ours was led by a love for where we worked and what we did, and wanting to keep doing it,” explains Huffman.
While union processes are different all around the world, organizers in Halifax did reach out to their unionized counterparts in Europe for help, with Ubisoft France Union STJV delivering Ubisoft Halifax’s letter of intent to the executive team in France, says Huffman.
After being in touch with CWA Canada, which represents workers in arts and media all across the country, the workers declared their intent to unionize in June 2025, with 74 percent voting to join. Certification from the Nova Scotia Labour Board didn’t occur until December due to issues brought up by Ubisoft during the process.
One of the arguments posited by the company was that certain employees working at the Ubisoft Halifax studio were not actually employees of Ubisoft Halifax, and instead members of other teams, insisting they can’t join the same union on that basis. According to Huffman, this argument had been dropped by Ubisoft quite suddenly. Those workers had also been laid off in the recent closure.
Shock and frustration
With the provincial labour board certifying their union before the holiday break, employees were excited to get back to work on the projects they cared about, whether that be the mobile games the studio was known for, or a PC title that Huffman says was almost ready for public playtesting.
Instead, just two days after their return to work, all 71 employees were called into a meeting with the head of Ubisoft’s mobile games division, telling them of the studio’s closure.
“There was a lot of shock. There were tears,” Huffman recounts. “More than one person had to kind of get up and step away from that meeting just to compose themselves so that they could come back and participate in the rest of it.”
Huffman says his shock quickly turned to action. He contacted their partners at CWA Canada to let them know of the situation. In a statement on Jan. 8, the union said it was not notified of the closure before the announcement.
Just a few days out from the closure, Huffman’s emotions have shifted.
“Frustrated,” he says. “At this point, it’s hard to look at it as we learn more, as we reflect on what happened. It’s very hard not to feel like this is directly related to our members coming together and deciding to form a union, and to have that done in the face of one of the most pro-company unions… we were very engaged. We loved where we worked. We were ready to sit down and work collaboratively with Ubisoft for everything going forward.
“For us to not even get to the point of that initial bargaining conversation, like, we never sat down with Ubisoft once. They challenged the formation of the union, the inclusion of some of our members, right up until the week of Dec. 15.”
Huffman says workers from the studio have kept in contact as the union fights to have Ubisoft release information proving its claim that the shutdown was a matter of financial restructuring. Whether it be sharing job opportunities, coordinating with each other for resume building and workshops, or simply gathering together to mourn their shared loss, the group has remained tightly-knit.
However, as far as Huffman is aware, Ubisoft hasn’t offered any jobs to those who were laid off from the Halifax studio. Those who have reached out to see what opportunities are available across the company have allegedly heard from Ubisoft that it has no interest in offering them jobs.
“This is rather surprising, considering it’s a regular occurrence in the past, as Ubisoft has downsized or closed studios to see what opportunities they could extend to those employees that were being affected,” says Huffman.
Hope for unions in the industry
The video game industry is notoriously unfriendly towards unions. Yet, despite the challenges faced by workers at Ubisoft Halifax, Huffman has hope for unions in the video game industry.
“I think that the game industry is inevitably going to unionize,” he says. “We are a major media industry, just like every other, and if we look back through history, most recently, we look back at the actions of the unions in TV and cinema. They exist for a reason. They came together for a reason. The same thing is happening in the game industry. We certainly weren’t the first, and we’re not going to be the last.
“If anything, we hope that this underscores for people the importance of coming together and supporting one another as workers.”
Huffman also expects this closure to have a dampening effect on the games industry in Nova Scotia. While there are small indie studios throughout the province, as well as HB Studios in Lunenburg, Ubisoft Halifax was the biggest presence the industry had in Halifax. However, he also expects it to bounce back.
“It’s going to take a while to recover. I don’t see it going away entirely. It’s too exciting of an industry. There are too many people who want to get into it, that want to be part of it. I think it’s natural for people to want to make something, and making games is just so much fun.”
CWA Canada continues to push Ubisoft to share documents proving its claim that the closure was a result of financial restructuring and had nothing to do with the union. Publicly available data shows Ubisoft took advantage of $11 million in Nova Scotian tax credits over its decade of operations.
Ubisoft did not respond to a request for comment before publication time.
