In yet another unionization effort within the last seven days, this time on the north side of the North American border, 74% of the Ubisoft Halifax team voted in favour of a wall-to-wall union and have joined the CWA Canada Local 30111, alongside Bethesda Game Studios Montreal and the Montreal Gazette staff.
The news was announced with a press release on the CWA Canada website, with the move adding 60 Ubisoft Halifax staff to Local 30111. Altogether, the staff represent several branches at the studio, including "producers, programmers, designers, artists, researchers, and development testers."
In a mission statement, the studio calls the union a move one made "not in opposition to Ubisoft, but in partnership, with the goal of ensuring our studio remains a beacon of equity, excellence, and innovation."
"In an era marked by industry-wide uncertainty, studio closures, layoffs, and increasing instability, we want to make clear our commitment to one another and to our craft," the statement reads. "We believe that creativity flourishes when workers feel secure, supported, and empowered."
The most recent studio to vote in favour of a wall-to-wall union was id Software, with 165 developers joining the CWA just last Friday, December 12. 2025 has also seen the ZeniMax Workers QA union finally reach a deal with Microsoft after two years of negotiating, another 450 Diablo developers voting in favour of unionization, and nearly 200 developers from the Overwatch 2 team at Blizzard voting for unionization.
Ubisoft Halifax is right to call out the uncertainty lurking in the industry. Microsoft, the defacto biggest publisher in the industry and one of the three big console manufacturers, has denied reports that it would shut down the entire Xbox platform. But with the number of layoffs Microsoft has had in its gaming division, it's understandable why people would even ask the question, and it's not a great sign for the industry to be in a place where people are earnestly asking this question.
Ubisoft has had three instances of layoffs this year. First, in January 2025, at its Ubisoft Leamington studio in the UK, followed by layoffs at Trials developer Ubisoft Redlynx, and layoffs at The Division, Star Wars Outlaws, and Frontiers of Pandora developer Massive Entertainment.
Now that the team has voted in favour of unionizing, the studio will begin to negotiate a contract with Ubisoft. "Now let’s get to work negotiating a first collective agreement that recognizes the talent and dedication of these workers," said CWA Canada president, Carmel Smyth.
CWA Canada has also been active elsewhere in the country, calling on Competition Bureau Canada to closely scrutinize EA's buyout deal to ensure it protects Canadian developers and consumers from a labour and security perspective, and organizing a protest outside of Rockstar Toronto in solidarity with the 34 workers fired from Rockstar this past October.
Since that continent-spanning dismissal, with 31 workers fired across the UK and three in Toronto, Rockstar has been accused of union-busting, though the studio denies the accusations and claims the fired workers had been "discussing and distributing confidential information (including specific game features from upcoming and unannounced titles) in a public forum."
Wccftech attended the protest to speak to those demonstrating, and also talked with one of the three workers fired from Toronto. The CWA Canada representatives who organized the protest, and the fired worker, both say that all the workers were doing was discussing their working conditions and organizing efforts in a private, employees-only and union-representatives-only Discord server.
"The official story from management is that they were, quote unquote, leaking sensitive information," said Nasr Ahmed, one of the CWA Canada representatives who organized the protest. "But we know that this is patently false. They [Rockstar] have not provided any proof for these claims, either for the Canadian workers or the UK workers. At the end of the day, discussing workers' rights and discussing working conditions is not against the law as far as I know, in either Canada or in the UK, which is exactly what these workers were doing."
One of the three workers fired from Rockstar Toronto said that "We were there mostly to talk about working conditions. Sometimes we would socialize, but the only reason we would ever be there was to discuss working conditions among the studio. I will also mention that we had a very thorough vetting process."
They also added, "We just want to get back to work on the game. We poured our heart and soul into it, and to be let go just for discussing our working conditions amongst ourselves and wanting the company to be better, it's heartbreaking."
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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