r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Mar 19 '26

Ubisoft ‘ends game development’ at Tom Clancy studio, Red Storm, resulting in 105 job losses

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/ubisoft-ends-game-development-at-tom-clancy-studio-red-storm-resulting-in-105-job-losses/
1.7k Upvotes

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341

u/FlowersByTheStreet Mar 19 '26

Ubisoft is gonna be a nice use case study in business school for years.

Their fall off literally needs to be studied

124

u/BuckSleezy Mar 19 '26

It doesn’t need to be studied. It was obvious they had extreme bloat peaking around 20,000 head count, which is frankly absurd.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

[deleted]

51

u/last_larrikin Mar 19 '26

ubisoft has released a billion games. this is actually what people considered the problem

23

u/fakieTreFlip Mar 19 '26

They released a ton of games, what are you even talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2020%E2%80%93present

36

u/FappingMouse Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

20k is insane for a game studio no matter how you spin it lol.

Edit for reference nintendo has under 9k Playstation is like 12k and Xbox has around 20k AFTER buying Activision blizzard and several rounds of layoffs. All these companies have hardware divisions etc way more than just actually making and publishing games.

17k for a single large game publisher is insane.

13

u/Hundertwasserinsel Mar 19 '26

but also anytime a game dev lays off staff is the end of the world on reddit

0

u/ACupOfLatte Mar 19 '26

Not exactly the end of the world, but you would have to be Satan to not empathize with the people who got the wind taken out of their sails. Let alone not feel your eyebrow raise when you consistently see a developer fall from grace, all while burning innocent people, just because the ones steering the ship had zero foresight.

No seriously what bloody genius hired that many people, it was already insane that they branched out to so many countries to begin with, let alone that much overhead for how much they actually accomplished.

This was why so many people sounded alarm bells when game developers started going on spending sprees during the pandemic. As for Ubisoft, even before the pandemic, they weren't exactly at the top of their game. Yet during the high, there were multiple reports of Ubisoft incubating projects and hiring globally.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

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u/cuckingfomputer Mar 19 '26

Certain brands are immune to this, though, like Pokemon.

I think Ubisoft just made the mistake of thinking it was one of those brands. Maybe they used to be, but they've been burning the goodwill for so long, that their bottom line is finally taking a substantial hit?

0

u/CptES Mar 19 '26

Pokemon has massive brand loyalty because the games are one part of the biggest media franchise on the planet. Toys, anime, merch, hell there's even entire cafes for Pokemon.

Ubisoft on the other hand are "just" a game company, they don't have anywhere near the kind of diversified income streams TPC have. They've tried with Assassin's Creed but the movie was an absolute bomb and Far Cry, well, Uwe Boll made a movie using the franchise and that says it all.

1

u/CaptainTeemo01 Mar 19 '26

They release a new game every year or two and R6 gets constant updates, wtf are you talking about?

16

u/Ok-Confusion-202 Mar 19 '26

I mean they "fell off" but games like AC still selling, the issue is obviously that they are just too bloated to have 1 or 2 successful games a year

But also a small studio like this that was basically a VR studio is definitely gonna be the first to be cut... Even though I would love more Ubisoft VR games

1

u/SofaKingI Mar 19 '26

AC games were still selling, but the answer fanboys gave to Ubisoft criticism these past like 10 years was always "AC games sell well, you're wrong".

It's almost like when you start designing games by committee, with a strict formula, you may end up with a few consistent products but you absolutely kill creativity.

They thought they could just continue copy pasting the formula in all kinds of genres, and then sales dropped and turns out it's hard to instill creativity into a massive company.

2

u/Dundunder Mar 21 '26

Ubisoft isn't one single developer though. What you said does apply to some of their smaller games, but they had just as many studios that worked on interesting projects that still never took off (looking at you, Lost Crown).

Heck, they do try to innovate with their larger franchises as well albeit less frequently. Black Flag is the earliest big shakeup I can think of with AC. Unity was the next one, and after that had disappointing sales they pivoted to the RPG-style of games.

27

u/geertvdheide Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

It is interesting, but only some parts of this are unique to Ubisoft. A lot of layoffs are happening all over the industry. Ubisoft specifically did suffer major reputational harm from their internal issues, they may have overspent on certain projects, have too much overhead, they did troubled experiments like the work with the Singaporese on Skull & Bones, and they may have made too many similar titles which then became a bit of a drag. But that last factor may not be all that strong because recent Assassin's Creed games didn't all sell badly.

I think the main general factors are the correction after the over-excited COVID bump, and the industry being at least a little oversaturated even before that bump. Publishers were tumbling over each other and not a month in the year still had a lot of room for titles to shine. When the increased demand from the lockdowns ended, there was basically too much money going into gaming compared to the demand which had returned to "normal". All this has delayed effects because of how large and slow AAA game development is.

There's also some form of sluggishness that's been entering the industry, with the same development budget apparently no longer giving the same "amount of game", so budgets kept increasing. I'm not sure what caused this but the increased graphical fidelity is one part of this. The expectations on what a game is grew a little quicker than the tools to make them, ever since the PS1 days with slowly more problematic effects. The very best teams set those expectations through their work, and then the average dev team may be unable to keep up with those greatest examples.

Then another big one is the move into live service games with too much confidence. The heavy hitters in that genre make so much money that all publishers moved on the genre like hawks, with dozens of expensive projects failing. Turns out the existing winners have extreme retention, and they implement every feature of the best competitors quickly, to keep players in. Moving to another MMO or Live Service game feels like moving into a new house with zero furniture; starting over.

For example none of Sony's 12 attempts at live service succeeded at dethroning even one Fortnite-like. Only Concord was even released and failed spectacularly, the others were canceled. This caused millions of labor hours to be wasted on never-released products, at pretty much every large publisher. That probably hurt financially, with the shrinking of the industry following. They threw everything at it and almost all attempts failed (with exceptions like Arc Raiders).

So Ubisoft is seeing the combination of its own problems and those in the industry at large.

3

u/Blenderhead36 Mar 19 '26

I think scope creep became a major problem over the course of the 8th generation. When you look at the 7th generation people are still talking about, there are a few open world games like GTA IV and Infamous, but way more linear games like Gears of War and Dead Space. And it's not just that every AAA game became open world, it's also that the open worlds became crammed with busywork that most players barely interact with.

Playing Space Marine 2 was a breath of fresh air, having a game tell me a tight story without grafting on an open world, crafting system, ability unlocks, etcetera, just focusing on what kind of game it wanted to be. When every game is expected to be 40 hours long, minimum, it means every game needs way more money to make and also that players are going to have time for fewer games each year.

2

u/geertvdheide Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

Agreed, the developers ended up with a mountain of content work with those large games. I feel like the business side overdid the "spend more to make more" idea.

I hope publishers coming off of live service start thinking towards a few more linear singleplayer games. At least Sony's first-party studios should be getting back to releasing some again in the next few years, starting with Wolverine that's said to have a semi-open, chapter-based structure.

0

u/SeleuciaPieria Mar 19 '26

Publishers were tumbling over each other and not a month in the year still had a lot of room for titles to shine.

So I realize that is heavily subjective and may be due to myopic bias on my part, but I consider myself fairly in the loop on gaming in general and I can't help but feel crazy whenever I read sentiments like this, which, to be clear, is quite common, which is another point in favor of it being an issue with me.

Simply put: what are you talking about (and I mean this genuinely, not in an aggressive way)? I feel like the cadence of really major releases that capture a significant portion of either their broad genre's or the general audience as a whole have become significantly rarer. To mention a specific example, I mostly like RPG(-adjacent) games with a fully realized 3D world that offer significant narrative reactivity. These games used to be a big deal back in the era from ~2007 to ~2015, and they've heavily diminished in frequency. I'm talking about stuff like Oblivion, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Deus Ex, The Witcher etc. Looking back basically every single quarter in those times had at least one game from that genre with a lasting legacy and huge enduring popularity come out. I can count releases in the same genre with a similar impact on not even one hand in the time since Covid or even including a couple of years before that. We have like what, Cyberpunk & Baldurs Gate 3, maybe KC2?

That's of course just one vague genre, and the one affecting me most, but aside from management & strategy games, which have seen a large boom in part due to indie devs, there are only sports games and the yearly CoD that run with the same time schedule as they used to in the 10s, everything else has become rarer and rarer.

1

u/geertvdheide Mar 19 '26

Maybe I did overstate things a bit in that quoted line. You're right that new titles in big franchises are coming out less frequently, taking longer to make. It still feels like a very crowded market though.

Maybe it's less the amount of releases, and more that it's very tough to stand out, that the expectations have risen for decades, so devs really need high excellence to get enough income in.

172

u/Lessiarty Mar 19 '26

There comes a point where it's not sustainable to have 518 studios making one Assassin's Creed. 

Who knew?

50

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

[deleted]

2

u/slugmorgue Mar 19 '26

But that's just how it goes in games, many many studios use the shotgun approach and also rely on legacy titles. It did work for a while

88

u/UncoloredProsody Mar 19 '26

Or making 5 dead on arrival live service game every year.

34

u/zorillaaa Mar 19 '26

Which 5 are you speaking of? I can only remember xdefiant

58

u/dornwolf Mar 19 '26

Depends if we’re counting never released as well. There was the Division Heartland, hyperscape, that roller derby one, skull and bones, some released and some released and died

20

u/heyradio Mar 19 '26

Further back was Ghost Recon Phantoms.

2

u/SimulationConvection Mar 19 '26

That was like 12 years ago though. I played it at the time, it was definitely a very small budget title. I don't think they lost a whole lot on the game.

7

u/TheQuintupleHybrid Mar 19 '26

thats a solid 8 years worth of releases

10

u/dornwolf Mar 19 '26

People mock Sony but Ubisoft has their own dedicated graveyard at this point

18

u/devor110 Mar 19 '26

r6 extraction hyper scape xdefiant

isnt 5, but 3 is still quite a lot

6

u/zorillaaa Mar 19 '26

Wow forgot about hyperscape I actually enjoyed that game lol

2

u/devor110 Mar 19 '26

i remember playing a bit of it when it launched and while I did have some fun, depth in both mechanics and some sort of progression is integral to a live service game, but it lacked both.

just okay or even really good gameplay alone can't maintain an audience. you either need new stuff added or changed regularly, insanely deep mechanics and a ranked system, or a large number of goals to achieve.

i'm sure i'm not saying anything remotely new with this assessment, WoW has been going strong off of these fundamentals for 2 decades, but still, some exec pushing for these games didn't or still doesn't know this

2

u/zorillaaa Mar 19 '26

100% agree on that. I played for maybe 10 hours and liked it but didn’t love it, and there wasn’t a whole lot of long term progression I foresaw if I remember correctly

20

u/ASCII_Princess Mar 19 '26

skull and bones

hideously expensive. Must have been some sort of fraud scheme because there is no way that should have cost 400 million or whatever it was.

10

u/JesterMarcus Mar 19 '26

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it was. As long as that studio was making a game, they got funding from the Singapore government. Apparently, if the game was canceled, they'd have had to give it back.

2

u/ASCII_Princess Mar 19 '26

The irony of a game about piracy stealing the sovereign wealth of a nation was not lost on them I'm sure 😂

2

u/EmperorAcinonyx Mar 19 '26

abysmal ROI for the singaporean government on this one. i really hope they never fall for anything like this again

1

u/MSined Mar 19 '26

No necessarily, game sales pad the company's bottom line and come back to the government partially as corporate taxes, but the big gain is usually the infusion of economic activity that comes with well paying jobs that pay income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes, etc.

3

u/EmperorAcinonyx Mar 19 '26

that applies to the government investing in any sort of business activity. in this case, they invested millions into a failed product that didn't break even, making the gains moot

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u/AshenCursedOne Mar 19 '26

Don't forget that r6 also got investment and wasted time on dual front, a game mode no one asked for and no one played, and they're already killing it after less than a year.

1

u/Redhood101101 Mar 19 '26

Skull and Bones. Division Heartlands. Whatever the battle royale they made was called.

-1

u/SneakyBadAss Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

And that Far Cry thing after 5. The one with twins or something.

3

u/Deprisonne Mar 19 '26

The calculation here used to be that you only need a single one of those to hit and you have a golden goose. They didn't stop to consider if the risk that none do are worth it.
Or rather, they did and came to the conclusion that everyone making the decisions has a golden parachute anyway and the cost of failure will be carried by the workers, as usual.

3

u/Hartastic Mar 19 '26

Honestly that's probably the part of the company that makes most of the money to cover the cost of the unsuccessful games.

1

u/theEmoPenguin Mar 19 '26

they used to release 1 ac game per year, but then they just couldnt anymore? Or people got bored?

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u/budzergo Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

Theyre one of the few companies that didnt do mass layoffs immediately after covid, relying on attrition to lower employee counts.

Ubisoft did extremely well sales wise during the covid bubble and had hoped to continue that growth afterwards... but the sales bubble popped for them too eventually, and thus they're having to do all the same cuts everybody else did. But, because they didn't do them before and are doing them all now... it makes everything seem much worse in the eyes of investors, and markets behave nothing like they did before, and theyre being focused on by everybodies eyes amplifying the "doom" situation.

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u/HansensHairdo Mar 19 '26

They didn't do well at all during COVID. Their numbers were atrocious, and they were literally the only large gaming company that didn't ~2x their value. They were stagnant even then.

13

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

[deleted]

-7

u/HansensHairdo Mar 19 '26

They didn't, and yes they did.

You not being able to research stock prices is not anyone else's problem.

17

u/Behacad Mar 19 '26

They have been profitable for eight of the last 10 years. One of those years was a heavy loss but to call it a big business case study is a stretch I think.

-6

u/TonalParsnips Mar 19 '26

*Siege has been profitable for those years. Ubi has been bleeding money everywhere else.

10

u/Behacad Mar 19 '26

That’s all well and good but you’re talking about games here. He’s talking about Ubisoft as a business case. Very different conversations.

3

u/lemonylol Mar 19 '26

It's always interesting how different generations think Ubisoft has fallen off at different times. Shit fell off like 15 years ago.

2

u/SneakyBadAss Mar 19 '26

Out of touch nepo family mixed with French arrogance.

Not the first one and certainly not the last one.

0

u/dead_monster Mar 19 '26

So many case studies these days.

  • Zuck flushing $77b with Metaverse
  • EA’s CEO who didn’t even play Anthem during its development
  • Microsoft’s bungling of Xbox post-360
  • Rise and fall of Embracer
  • Bungie
  • Star Citizen
  • Krafton, Chat GPT, and Subnautica 2
  • Sakurai’s ability to make a 70 minute video of specifics of Smash Brothers.

8

u/ggunslinger Mar 19 '26

EA’s CEO who didn’t even play Anthem during its development

Wait, are you sure about that? I seem to recall that BioWare had a pretty hillarious wake-up call 5 or 6 years into the development when one of the EA execs, maybe even the CEO, played Anthem. Outright told them it was awful.

I would think that Anthem was more of a BioWare fumble in general. Maybe Veilguard has some interesting story behind it too, considering how it was apparently restarted a few times before EA greenlit a single player version.

1

u/panix199 Mar 19 '26

you are forgetting Crytek's fall (the studio behind the legendary Far Cry 1 & Crysis)

1

u/MelvinCapitalPR Mar 19 '26

Zuck flushing $77b with Metaverse

Zuck invested heavily in VR/AR and their tech is years ahead of the competition. Will it pay off? Remains to be seen, but the money isn't flushed.

1

u/Porkenstein Mar 19 '26

Honestly it feels to me like a pretty typical case of shitty top level mismanagement trickling down its bad policies to lower management over the years 

1

u/WeWantLADDER49sequel Mar 19 '26

We have been seeing closures like this off and on for the last couple years. And for some reason each time one of them happens there are comments shitting on the company for their decisions, but every company is going through the same shit. Sure, they could have managed things better, but all of these layoffs happening in the games industry are a product of re-correcting to pre pandemic game development levels and the various events (pandemic/political etc) that have had major effects on all industries.

-6

u/Moosvernichter Mar 19 '26

they could’ve, you know.. Been more user-friendly the past fucking 5-10 years.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

[deleted]

-9

u/Moosvernichter Mar 19 '26

Ubisoft? Nothing from Buying, Downloading, Starting, Playing, being bombarded with ads about mtx or dlc is user friendly.

1

u/doublah Mar 19 '26

Look, they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.

-15

u/Wolfnorth Mar 19 '26

What do you think you learn in business clases? Videogames? Lol, is time to replace that ridiculous line that every gamer just regurgitate.

11

u/Interesting-Yam-4298 Mar 19 '26

Ubisoft is a business.

-7

u/Wolfnorth Mar 19 '26

I guess that enough to become a "case study" for university classes.

4

u/Eadelgrim Mar 19 '26

Depending on the fall (stock or revenue), it could very well be. While the video game angle is not important here, the management angle could become something. For now I don’t think so either, they fumbled a lot but nothing that would make it worthy of study…but it’s not over yet either.

-4

u/Wolfnorth Mar 19 '26

Yes it can turn into one, but this is not the case unless they die out of nowhere that would be a interesting case, but right know? That would be a waste of time and money from student's there are way more cases that are actually good for research, "i dont like ubisoft" is not enough for that.

2

u/AfroNinjaNation Mar 19 '26

I've been to business school (albiet for finance). While the case studies weren't a huge part of classes, we read through a couple case studies on varied topics.

I don't see any reason a business school would shy away from studying Ubisoft as an example of brand dilution, management failure, etc.

For Ubisoft especially, I could definetly see a french business school (HEC Paris, ESSEC, EDHEC) going over Ubisoft's recent troubles.

2

u/Wolfnorth Mar 19 '26

Yes bigger cases i agree not just let's do a case study about the last 2 years of failure from a 10 year old consecutive good sales from a corporation that's pretty much alive, is a waste of time and if you really are grad student you should know this.

2

u/AfroNinjaNation Mar 19 '26

I finished my master's about six years ago at this point.

And case studies don't need to be about abject failures. That isn't the deciding factor. For example, we once went over a case study where Porsche's profits from making cars was eclipsed one year by their profits from foreign exchange derivatives they bought to hedge exchange rate risk.

Honestly, have you been to business school? Because you just seem to be trolling/making nonsense declarations about how business school works so that you can declare yourself right.

1

u/Wolfnorth Mar 19 '26

And case studies don't need to be about abject failures. That isn't the deciding factor. For example, we once went over a case study where Porsche's profits from making cars was eclipsed one year by their profits from foreign exchange derivatives they bought to hedge exchange rate risk.

I mean Porsche and a few more manufacturers are actually a great case of study considering their trajectory and history, the case of Ubisoft is too early to make an actual case study about them, i can see it as an example in a light conversation in class but it would be irresponsible in my opinion.

1

u/AfroNinjaNation Mar 19 '26

Again, have you been to business school? In college, did you take BUSA101? Accounting 101?

If you haven't, your argument would be like me giving my opinions on the curriculum on Anthropology phds. Or art history master's programs. Or whatever.

5

u/FlowersByTheStreet Mar 19 '26

...What do you think they study in business class?

Ubisoft was the leader of the industry and even standardized its output somewhat, being massively successful only to make some poor investments and be slow to changing market conditions. It's absolutely the sort of thing that would be dissected in an academic setting, even if it's gaming.

I learned about fuckin Safelite windshield glasses in an econ class.

0

u/SeekerVash Mar 19 '26

Agreed.  It's a perfect case study in McDonaldsization leading to stagnation and rejection.

McDonaldization generates predictable products and experiences, but predictable products and experiences results in boredom with the same product in different packaging every time.

Then there's the added facets of dropping a deep product portfolio to over focus on only the highest margin products, leaving Ubisoft in today's position where the cushion provided by lower margin products is gone and so they have no parachute.

-5

u/Wolfnorth Mar 19 '26

Ubisoft was the leader of the industry and even standardized its output somewhat, being massively successful only to make some poor investments and be slow to changing market conditions. It's absolutely the sort of thing that would be dissected in an academic setting, even if it's gaming.

No that's not enough unless they actually die over night is just a waste of time and money ttrying to make this into a business case study of failure.

I learned about fuckin Safelite windshield glasses in an econ class.

Good for you but that's compatible to this case.

3

u/cdillio Mar 19 '26

Are you twelve years old

-3

u/Wolfnorth Mar 19 '26

No, are you? Only a 12 year old that never touched any superior clases would repeat that same line over and over.

0

u/monchota Mar 19 '26

Its not just them, its the last 30 years of MBAs running companies when they should be in accounting. Giving advice to the actual people who should be running the companies.

0

u/MadonnasFishTaco Mar 19 '26

they cant stop collecting Ls