The video game industry is once again questioned in its decision-making, this time it is about Ashraf Ismail, who was previously the creative director of Assassin’s Creed for deliveries Origins y Valhallaalthough his name was removed from the latter due to the problems he had with Ubisoft.
Ismail is now part of the TiMi Studio Group, a studio in charge of titles such as Pokémon Unite, Call of Duty Mobile, Honor of Kings y Arena of Valor, and serves as consultant creative director, TiMi Studio is one of the highest earning studios for Tencent. Nevertheless, Ismail has a past, which the study curiously ignored despite being something public and proventhe creative director was fired from Ubisoft for misconduct.
For 2020, Ubisoft received several complaints about Ismail related to misconduct with colleagues new to the industry, especially women.whom he deceived by lying about his marital status and took advantage of his position to persuade them, which revealed a series of accusations throughout the company, to the point that Ubisoft workers signed a letter last year, where they asked the company to take action on the matter regarding the problems of harassment and misconduct.
It is one year to the day that we signed our open letter to Ubisoft management calling for FAR more action to tackle abuse and setting out our four key demands. None of our demands have been met.#ABetterUbisoft #EndAbuseInGaming
A thread 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/YaXrEGVa0M
— A Better Ubisoft 🤍 (@ABetterUbisoft) July 28, 2022
A year ago we signed our open letter to Ubisoft management asking for MUCH more action to address abuse and setting out our four key demands. None of our demands have been met.
25% of the workers who signed the letter have since left the company, the vast majority being women, despite this fact, to say the least embarrassing, TiMi Studio Group decided to hire the creative director and even stated publicly that Ismail has behaved in a professional manner. and has consistently demonstrated an eagerness to learn and grow as a team member and person.
Ismail published in 2020 on his Twitter account the deepest reasons for everything that happened at Ubisoft, ensuring that he had to properly deal with the personal issues of his life, which were deeply shatteredIt is gap apparently it helped the creative director to organize things and start from scratch.
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Only time will tell us if the creative director will relapse into these behaviors, but the decision of a studio of this caliber to hire someone with a history of misconduct, which can be related to harassment, is controversial at least, something that in this industry of video games is a huge problem and that in many companies it has gotten out of control.
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