One of the top execs at Ubisoft says that its staff come first and financials are a secondary concern.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, executive director for the French firm's Worldwide Studios Christine Burgess-Quémard says that an individual's creativity is vital to its success and that Ubisoft is not beholden to the bottom line.

"We are not a company that is handled by financials," she said.

"We don't base everything on financials. We put the human in the centre of our company. This is the video game industry, we don't have machines like other industries have. Our power and our wealth is in people's creativity. It is their brains. What makes our success is the people's motivation and creativity. We build studios for the long-run."

Furthermore, Burgess-Quémard explains that Ubisoft is keen to give people a second chance if their projects don't go to plan.

"It's not so much that we say don't worry if you get it wrong; because of the budgets involved, we don't want people to get it wrong because the risk is so high," she said.

"But we have a saying: at Ubisoft you always have a second chance. We don't cut people's heads [off] if they make a mistake first time. We would give them a second chance.

"But what is rewarded, obviously, is the success. When you have a successful project, you will have all these people behind you who will feel the success as well, and share the success. That's why we also have incentive programmes, to make sure that people feel really part of the project."

This comes in the wake of companies like Activision Blizzard appearing to put the financial bottom line ahead of the creativity and welfare of its workers, with CEO Robert Kotick announcing an eight per cent cut to its roughly 9,900-strong employees while boasting of record revenue. 

While we hope this isn't as cynical as we suspect, it's possible that the interview was Ubisoft attempting to score some PR points on this issue.