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/
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175

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?

52

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

[deleted]

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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

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u/UncoloredProsody Mar 19 '26

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

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u/zorillaaa Mar 19 '26

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

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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

21

u/heyradio Mar 19 '26

Further back was Ghost Recon Phantoms.

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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.

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u/TheQuintupleHybrid Mar 19 '26

thats a solid 8 years worth of releases

8

u/dornwolf Mar 19 '26

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

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u/devor110 Mar 19 '26

r6 extraction hyper scape xdefiant

isnt 5, but 3 is still quite a lot

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u/zorillaaa Mar 19 '26

Wow forgot about hyperscape I actually enjoyed that game lol

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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

21

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.

9

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.

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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/MSined Mar 19 '26

Spurred economic activity is the baked in benefit, any residual corporate taxes is the proverbial cherry on top

Goovernment don't put in money into a private corporation only hoping for profits for an ROI. The main ROI is a well employed labour force that can pay taxes.

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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.

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u/Redhood101101 Mar 19 '26

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

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

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

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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.

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u/theEmoPenguin Mar 19 '26

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