Pros
- Great coworkers. Those that stay are talented, excited to work, happy to help, and want what's best for the games & players. - Decent benefits. - A good place to start your game development career. - A lot of opportunity to learn with some room to grow. Ubisoft (Toronto) was a very easy company to work for. I loved my coworkers, the projects always had great learning opportunities, and was mostly remote until RTO was mandated back. Over the years I got to work with incredibly talented folks and had ample opportunities to develop my skills and learn new technologies.
Cons
- Studio management and corporate management are hilariously out of touch and archaic practices of reviewing games are preventing Ubisoft from succeeding. - Pay is middling, raises are small, Toronto is expensive. - The upper levels of management will do Q&A's and pretend to listen, but don't actually care. - Silently cutting benefits, RTO, and laying people off without notice, while dancing around questions as to why this is happening. - The tech, while mostly good to work with, suffers from being almost entirely internal, meaning that it's harder to transfer your skills outside of Ubisoft as companies want you to work with publicly available tools. Management at the upper levels needs a massive shakeup. People fail upwards commonly, developers are not listened to at all, good games get cancelled, the review process needs a massive overhaul, benefits are being cut, questions aren't answered, people are being laid off, and games are consistently underperforming and upper management genuinely can't understand why. Ubisoft could be a game development powerhouse but creativity is throttled in the name of making more money.