Black Flag Resynced is the biggest Assassin's Creed Steam launch ever. The people who made it are on strike.

The Ubisoft studio closest to us doesn't exist anymore. Belgrade, opened in 2016, around a hundred people, shut down in June as part of the same restructuring wave that's currently rolling over the rest of the company. That was the region's biggest foothold in a AAA publisher - a place where people from Zagreb, Novi Sad, Sarajevo actually went to work on Ghost Recon, The Crew 2, Skull & Bones. Now it's a line in a press release.

I keep that in mind while reading the numbers for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, because the numbers are genuinely good. Two million copies sold on launch day. On Steam alone, according to market analysts Alinea Analytics, roughly 701,000 copies and about $35 million in revenue as of 13 July, plus another million from minor DLC. That's the best Steam launch any Assassin's Creed has ever had. Ubisoft is, rightly, shouting about it.

And Ubisoft Barcelona - one of the studios that actually built the thing - spent this week on a three-day strike.

Success didn't save anyone

Around 51 workers in Barcelona are affected by cuts first announced in June. Negotiations are still going, the union is backing the remaining developers, and they're fighting for better terms for the people being shown the door. "Enough with the unjustified cuts" is the message. Hard to argue with the word *unjustified* when your studio just co-delivered the publisher's best Steam launch in the series' history.

This is the part that gets me. We're used to the grim version of this story - game flops, studio closes, everyone shrugs and says that's the market. This isn't that. This is the good version, the one where the bet paid off, and the layoffs happen anyway. Which tells you the cuts were never really about whether the game worked.

The wider picture is worse than one studio. The June round put up to 380 roles at risk and closed Belgrade and Winnipeg outright. Barcelona also props up Rainbow Six Siege, a game that's been printing money for a decade.

There's a small, quietly funny footnote in the Steam data: the microtransactions are dividing players and mostly getting rejected. A million dollars in DLC against $35 million in actual game sales. People turned up in droves to buy a good remake of a 2013 pirate game and then largely ignored the shop. Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere, though I doubt it's the one being read in the boardroom.

So what do you do with this? I'm not going to tell you to boycott Black Flag - it's a good game, and refusing to buy it mostly punishes the exact people already being laid off. But I'd stop pretending sales figures and job security have anything to do with each other at this scale. They don't. Belgrade proved that to us up close, months before Barcelona had to walk out to prove it again.

Image: William Tung from USA / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SDCC13_-_Assassins_Creed_IV_Pirate_Ship_(9348028532).jpg