Jusant or how the team behind a masterpiece fell victim to restructuring

This article is (as with any other) written by me and is my opinion only.

🎮 | Foreword : Play Jusant!

Even if DON'T NOD the studio behind Jusant has made some terrible choices these past years, Jusant is still a fantastic game and DON'T NOD is a studio worth following. Jusant has been a very beautiful experience for me at a time where I needed it. If you like the sea, stories of fishermen and fantastic megastructures, play it (it's like 5 hrs to beat) and come back to this blogpost afterward.

💯 | Introduction

So have you heard of Jusant ? What a wonderful and beautiful game! I remembered when I found out about this game by watching a GMTK video. Watching the trailer sold me on it and there was like -20% off so I bought it, played it and loved it! This game has a beautiful art-style and is slightly inspired by french maritime coast which is always beautiful. I am not inventing that by the way, it is in the credits of the game!

👀 | When I love a game, I like to look more into its history...

I think that, like most gamedevs, I like to look into the history of a game's creation. That lead me to look into DON'T NOD the french videogame studio based in Paris. I felt a moment of patriotic proudness : "Yes ! France is a great place to make games!" I thought. And it is! DON'T NOD is a great studio but only creatively.

🤔 | Why is... Tencent here too?

I discovered from a bit of searching that the 41% of DON'T NOD's shares belonged to Tencent. I felt that was odd since I remembered Tencent only invested in multiplayer games like VALORANT where there are shady data collection and potentially (?) illegal data transfers to China which I'm not quite happy to learn about but you know "it's the game industry" I thought slightly concerned that I had agreed to the "anonymous data collection for analytical purposes only". Source : official DON'T NOD shares report

To be clear I don't really hate Tencent but it still feels like a shady company to me and I try to avoid using services that come from places where the law doesn't protect EU citizens and EU data as much.

❌ | They... did WHAT?!

A few weeks after my second playthrough, I was looking up some news about Jusant on internet and I stumbled upon an article like this "Malgré le succès critique du jeu, l'Equipe aurait été démantelée et dispersée au sein de DON'T NOD" translation :

Despite the critical success of the game, the team [making Jusant] has been broken appart and scattered throughout DON'T NOD.

For me, that was the last straw, the one that "breaks the camel's back". And still today I truly wonder : why oh why did DON'T NOD so violently restructured this incredible team in spite of the tremendous success of Jusant ?

Luckily, most DON'T NOD employees are unionized as this is the most efficient way that workers can make themselves heard and it's a part of french culture to be so. (socialism was largely born in France after all.)

The STJV (Syndicat des Travailleurs du Jeu Vidéo = Union of VideoGame Workers) wrote an article about this infuriating forced restructuration which you can read here. It basically states that DON'T NOD has too many productions in line and that this is detrimental to the employees. And we know sad employees in a creative space tend to make less creative stuff and less interesting stuff which then impacts us the gamers. To be clear the most important part is the well-being of employees not the happiness of die-hard fans (like me) though also important to the business of gamemaking.

💬 | TL;DR & My message to game companies.

In short, I do not understand the move of DON'T NOD higher-ups here. Why would you break a winning team ? This short blogpost isn't to only blame DON'T NOD though it's also yet another statement on how ill the gamemaking industry truly is. The studio is just a cog forced to turn with anyone else. But as with anything, the strongest force wins. I believe all gamedevs, from me a simple hobbyist to a professional developer should be aware of such problems of the industry and also TAKE ACTION AGAINST THOSE ! If enough of the community is able to push against such behaviors, not only will games be more attractive to players which would result in more profit but workers would we happier and higher productivity would follow.

So this is also a message to any manager in any company : make it easy for your workers to be creative. Do not bend to the shareholder's desire of fast profit and send them this article. I am SURE everyone with at least 3 braincells can understand why splitting apart a team of good employees goes against any logic and potentially hurts profits. I am SURE that you can understand why trying to overproduce games results in basically nothing good either for developers, players and companies alike.