A new online gaming-focused broadcast going by the name of gTV has been announced by Ubisoft, and the new streaming channel focuses on the positive aspects of the gaming industry. This may strike some as cynical at best, considering the company's somewhat recent controversies. Ubisoft was founded in 1986 by five brothers and has since grown to become one of the world's largest game publishers and developers, with branches and subsidiaries located all over the world. The company is best known for major game franchises like Assassin's Creed, its many assorted Tom Clancy titles, and others, but it made headlines in 2020 for allegedly sponsoring and covering employee abuse and sexism, leading to some key departures at multiple levels of the company.
While the company has grown in popularity and financial success over the years, the ethical reputation of Ubisoft recently plummeted. Following a shocking influx of allegations and internal investigations, a number of key staff at several Ubisoft studios have been let go or resigned over the last year. Current and former employee reports range from verbal and physical abuse, discrimination, and sexual harassment permeating the workplace. Ubisoft claims to be working to address its toxic work culture issue, and CEO Yves Guillemot (somewhat unsatisfactorily) apologized on the company's behalf while maintaining a lack of personal knowledge of what was going on at the last Ubisoft Forward.
The latest in these distractions comes with Ubisoft's announcement of a new online television program called gTV, an online-only channel that promises to celebrate the positive side of gaming as a whole. The new UK-oriented station is available to watch on Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook after being revealed Wednesday. Ubisoft states that gTV will be have multimedia variety, airing talk shows, documentaries, live programs, and more from a diverse range of content creators and influencers in the industry.
While the company publicly pushes diversity and community in the content it produces, it seems that Ubisoft can't consistently uphold its own standards. Assassin's Creed, one of the company's biggest franchises, was revealed last year to be influenced heavily by the sexist views of high-level staff, who reportedly actively reduced female roles in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and other entries. In a separate instance, Ubisoft again came under fire for comparing the anti-police violence and anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement to a terrorist organization in Tom Clancy's Elite Squad. These controversies on top of the publisher's reported abuse issues make gTV's positivity angle seem disingenuous.
Beyond smelling of corporate toxic positivity, gTV is inherently built on the unethical practices of its publisher despite its public efforts to move past them. Even if there's nothing wrong with the content of this new entertainment program, it's important to keep acknowledging the real behind-the-scenes abuses and their offenders if the gaming industry ever wants to truly grow beyond the stereotypes and prejudices that Ubisoft has embodied for the past year.
Sources: gTV