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[Libération] Exposé on Michel Ancel’s brutal and demoralizing management style at Ubisoft (depression, burnout, and more)
- Thread starter Orbulon
- Start date
To be fair rats are pretty good swimmer....they're just not very good at swimming underwater.
Jesus christ. What a read. Such a damn shame all around.Cario & Chapuis are back with a bunch of articles about the development of BGE2, including an interview with Ancel showing a distinct lack of empathy from the creator of Rayman.
https://next.liberation.fr/images/2...ses-effarantes-d-un-blockbuster-geant_1800522
TL,DR : BGE2 has already been more than seven years in the making and is only coming out of pre-production. Ancel was working part-time on the project as an outside contractor and would "knit and unknit" the teams' work at will. Because of that, the upper management set an 18-men organization around him in order to limit his impact on the teams but said organization ended up being equally dysfunctional.
Michel Ancel : «On a signé pour se mettre en danger»
Le créateur star de «Rayman» s’explique sur sa retraite anticipée et sur sa direction controversée du projet «Beyond Good and Evil 2».next.liberation.fr
Beyond Good & Evil is one of me favorite games ever,it is almost magical to me and it is so disappointing to read this.
Hopefully now ,with Ancel gone things will take a turn for the better.
Hopefully now ,with Ancel gone things will take a turn for the better.
Yep. And, thought BG&E2 has never been what I wanted as a sequel, it did look really cool, so I do hope they can deliver on the vision of the early prototype.
Auteurs are weird. There's usually an undeniable spark they bring, but you'll often notice similar people across their works. David Lynch is pretty notable in that you can often tell when Mary Sweeney edited his work, like with Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, which had more commercial success and were about as accessible as you can get with him. I imagine in Video Games the teams are even more important as you have to start from scratch. You can't just frame or reinterpret something that already exists.
After reading through the quoted portions of the articles (the article itself is behind a paywall, so I don't know if there's anything more) and reading various other details from behind the scenes... I think Michel Ancel, while not "innocent", does not deserve the hate campaign that's currently going on against him due to this article. Instead, that should be aimed at Ubisoft's upper management. Here's why:
In 2013, after Rayman Legends, it was getting clear that working with a small team was a pipe dream when at Ubisoft, so he ended up trying to leave, and create a new studio - again: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/michel-ancel-leaving-ubisoft/1100-6404404/
However, this is where Ubisoft's management's biggest mistake is - instead of allowing him to actually leave Ubisoft fully, they negotiated with him so he would work at both his own studio and Ubisoft at the same time, just so that they would not lose this "famous auteur"...
Like the article mentions, they would greenlight a sequel to his personal dream project (BG&E) while only really checking in two mornings a week.
Michel Ancel accepted, which was definitely a bad choice. He ended up working part-time at two studios, which wouldn't have been good for any of them.
Ubisoft also still put him in charge of big teams, which was the whole reason why he tried to leave to start his own studio in the first place.
As an attempt to make his auteur attitude work in these big teams, Ubisoft added in a team of "opponents" for Michel Ancel who would push back against all of his decisions - as mentioned in the article, this team of "opponents" was created with the full confidence of Serge Hascoët (the main sexual harasser from the recent allegations) and are "part of the Ubisoft family" (which by now we know is not a very good sign) . The main "opponent" was also the creative director of Ghost Recon, which is very much unlike what Michel Ancel was aiming for with Beyond Good & Evil. How could Ubisoft's management not see that this was creating further problems?
Can you imagine trying to make your dream project and having to fight for every tiny decision you make? It sounds... extremely frustrating. Sadly, it seems Ancel took out this frustration on the team and ultimately just decided to stop because of it. The frustration of the team is totally understandable, and yes, it is a result of Ancel's behavior... but I believe that that in turn is a result of Ubisoft's management's decisions. In his poorly formulated Instagram response to all this, Michel Ancel seems to imply that this is indeed the case:
Again, I do not think Ancel is blameless here -- for example, he should have left Ubisoft in 2013 or should have left when the team of "opponents" was established. Instead he stayed and let himself play a big part in this toxic environment.
But instead of persecuting this guy, why don't y'all persecute Ubisoft's management instead?
This is entirely correct. Michel Ancel has in the past, in various interviews, expressed difficulty in trying to work with large teams, and numerous times has he tried to go back to working in smaller teams. Back in 2010, he quit the BG&E2 project to work in a smaller team. It was first rumored that this new studio was outside of Ubisoft, but it seems Ubisoft managed to keep him and his new studio (presumably after negotiations providing various benefits for Michel Ancel), and have them work on Rayman Origins:
Source: https://raymanpc.com/wiki/en/Michel_Ancel
In 2013, after Rayman Legends, it was getting clear that working with a small team was a pipe dream when at Ubisoft, so he ended up trying to leave, and create a new studio - again: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/michel-ancel-leaving-ubisoft/1100-6404404/
He then followed through on this plan and created Wild Sheep Studio.
However, this is where Ubisoft's management's biggest mistake is - instead of allowing him to actually leave Ubisoft fully, they negotiated with him so he would work at both his own studio and Ubisoft at the same time, just so that they would not lose this "famous auteur"...
Like the article mentions, they would greenlight a sequel to his personal dream project (BG&E) while only really checking in two mornings a week.
Michel Ancel accepted, which was definitely a bad choice. He ended up working part-time at two studios, which wouldn't have been good for any of them.
Ubisoft also still put him in charge of big teams, which was the whole reason why he tried to leave to start his own studio in the first place.
As an attempt to make his auteur attitude work in these big teams, Ubisoft added in a team of "opponents" for Michel Ancel who would push back against all of his decisions - as mentioned in the article, this team of "opponents" was created with the full confidence of Serge Hascoët (the main sexual harasser from the recent allegations) and are "part of the Ubisoft family" (which by now we know is not a very good sign) . The main "opponent" was also the creative director of Ghost Recon, which is very much unlike what Michel Ancel was aiming for with Beyond Good & Evil. How could Ubisoft's management not see that this was creating further problems?
Can you imagine trying to make your dream project and having to fight for every tiny decision you make? It sounds... extremely frustrating. Sadly, it seems Ancel took out this frustration on the team and ultimately just decided to stop because of it. The frustration of the team is totally understandable, and yes, it is a result of Ancel's behavior... but I believe that that in turn is a result of Ubisoft's management's decisions. In his poorly formulated Instagram response to all this, Michel Ancel seems to imply that this is indeed the case:
Michel Ancel said:
Again, I do not think Ancel is blameless here -- for example, he should have left Ubisoft in 2013 or should have left when the team of "opponents" was established. Instead he stayed and let himself play a big part in this toxic environment.
But instead of persecuting this guy, why don't y'all persecute Ubisoft's management instead?
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Plenty of people ITT have blasted Guillemot & others. Ancel doesn't get a pass just because he had enablers.
100% not surprised.
edit : big oof at some of the downplaying above. Accountability isn't a hate campaign. Yes, ubi's upper management was and still is 100% shit, but Angel being a creative diva who breaks people is 100% on him.
edit : big oof at some of the downplaying above. Accountability isn't a hate campaign. Yes, ubi's upper management was and still is 100% shit, but Angel being a creative diva who breaks people is 100% on him.
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Awful and it's so crushing when working on a creative endeavour you're passionate and driven around. People willing to manipulate, exploit and abuse that can thrive in management positions, especially with any cult of personality around them and "hands off" approaches by those higher up the chain.
Have been under the bootheel of someone like that before and it sent me to the ER a number of times. Good riddance to him but those impacted should be supported in their recovery. The response of "it's up to them to get help" belongs in the same bin as the people it helped enable.
Have been under the bootheel of someone like that before and it sent me to the ER a number of times. Good riddance to him but those impacted should be supported in their recovery. The response of "it's up to them to get help" belongs in the same bin as the people it helped enable.
And not just rotten - keeping Ancel, heck, forcing Ancel into managing a big studio was sheer incompetence.