Game developers are criticizing Ubisoft for their latest partnership with HitRecord, calling it exploitative of musicians.
Ubisoft recently announced their partnership with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's company for the upcoming game, Watch Dogs: Legion, whereby fans and hobbyists can collaboratively create music that might be featured in the game.
The idea of the site is to take in submissions from anyone online and build something great using whatever people contribute. One person might provide a nice reverb while another person provides an interesting electronic beat or vocals. Ubisoft audio directors then take what they like and include it in the finished product. Whoever’s songs get selected will get $2,000 split between everyone who contributed to that song’s creation.
While the collaborative theme really fits with the overall plot of Legion by recruiting everyone around you to overthrow a totalitarian regime, it’s struck a bad chord with game developers and professional artists.
At issue is the fact that while Ubisoft will pay for the songs they select, unselected songs get paid nothing. This means you could go to a lot of trouble to create a really nice piece of music and still wind up with nothing to show for it.
IGN highlights quite a few big-name developers that call this practice “speculative work.” Mike Bithell, the man behind indie titles like Subsurface Circular, Thomas Was Alone, and the upcoming John Wick Hex, was succinct in his criticism of Ubisoft’s partnership with HitRecord: “This sucks.”
Games Workers Unite, an international organization that fights for better working conditions for game studios and developers, was also harsh in their criticism of Ubisoft and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the Hollywood actor who owns HitRecord.
“Disgusting. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a union contract yet he's peddling spec work for a billion dollar company. The game industry exploits our passion to pay unlivable wages, this is the next logical step. Soliciting unpaid labor for a product that will make millions. #NoSpec.”
The #NoSpec hashtag is once again trending on Twitter thanks to the recent Watch Dogs: Legion announcement. Ironically, it was Ubisoft’s partnership with HitRecord in their previous title, Beyond Good And Evil 2, which caused the hashtag to circulate on Twitter last year.