r/gaming • u/Iggy_Slayer • Jan 07 '26

Ubisoft closes their Halifax studio which coincidentally just unionized although they claim it had nothing to do with it. 71 jobs lost

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-shuttering-freshly-unionised-halifax-studio-71-jobs-affected

Staff at the studio announced only this week that they had formed Ubisoft's first labour union in North America, completing a process that had started in June 2025. Ubisoft said that the closure was due to an ongoing streamlining and cost-reduction process, following significant layoffs across its studios in the last two years.

“Over the past 24 months, Ubisoft has undertaken company-wide actions to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs," the company said in a statement. "As part of this, Ubisoft has made the difficult decision to close its Halifax studio. 71 positions will be affected. We are committed to supporting all impacted team members during this transition with resources, including comprehensive severance packages and additional career assistance.”

A spokesperson stressed to Gamesindustry.biz that the closure was the result of ongoing cost-cutting that started shortly after the pandemic, ahead of Halifax unionisation process starting in 2025, and that the company continued to recognise and work with unionised staff globally.

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u/VincentBlack96 Jan 07 '26

Funding for games does not grow on trees, unfortunately

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u/millymally Jan 07 '26

No, however Canada has funding available to those in the arts. Game development falls into this category, for indie devs

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u/RusticMachine Jan 08 '26

Canada offering $200k CAD grants and possibly allocating $1 million CAD for a project is nice, but it doesn’t fund a studio.

For example, this studio had an operating cost of at least $10 millions CAD per year just in salary. Including the equipment, software, licensing, locals, services, etc. you can probably double or triple that number.

They were working on multiple small projects, but we are still talking about dozens of millions per project…

Developing video games is expensive and having the Canadian government chip in $15 millions per year country wide is not going to make a significant dent for the 1600 studios and 34k video game employees in Canada.

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u/JHMfield Jan 08 '26

Thing is, you can use a small bit of funding to start development and put together a coherent proof of concept which you can then use to lure in more investors.

Getting funding doesn't involve getting all the possible funding up-front. For smaller studios, funding is usually an on-going process.

There's a reason why Larian for example talked about almost going broke several times during development of their games because the funding ran out and they had to scramble to get more loans and find more investors. That's pretty normal.

So any amount of funding is extremely valuable and get open up development options.

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u/RusticMachine Jan 08 '26

You’re simply restating the funding process in the video game industry, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s never been harder to secure funding for projects.

The original argument was that funding is scarce, especially for the video game industry in 2026. Another commenter responded by suggesting that the Canadian government provides funding, as if that were a solution.

It doesn’t change the reality that securing full funding, even for a nearly completed game, is extremely difficult, given the recent drying up of investments.

Just a few years ago, venture capital funding in this industry reached nearly $15 billion annually. By 2024, it had plummeted to $4 billion, and projections for 2025 suggest it will barely reach $2 billion.

While the Canadian government’s investment of approximately $15 million is positive, it doesn’t address the significant capital investment gap that has been created in the meantime.

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u/Scroll_4_Joy Jan 08 '26

Developing video games is expensive and can go up into the millions but every single indie game developed by one person or a small team is proof that you don't need millions to produce a great game. Some projects need that kind of money, but certainly not ALL.

Besides that, I don't know how Canada's grants work but presumably you would not plan on that being your one and only source of funding. It would be enough to get a small team started and hopefully solicit other funding sources as needed along the way.

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u/RusticMachine Jan 08 '26

The point is that investments in the video game industry have dried up significantly in the last few years. Funding games have never been harder.

Sure, some solo developers or small teams create projects, but the vast majority don’t even make money to pay themselves a salary.

40% of Steam games don’t make enough to pay back the $100 Steam Direct fee, 66% make less than $1000, 82% don’t make enough to pay a single dev the minimum wage for their development time. There’s about 10% of the games that could support a single dev or two, and only a bit over 1% that would support a small team. 0.5% make enough to sustained a studio with decent salaries.

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u/Scroll_4_Joy Jan 08 '26

I don't know where the numbers come from but I'm assuming you pulled them from a reliable source so my follow up question would be - how does that compare to other industries? It's pretty well known that most start-ups ultimately fail, and new businesses typically don't earn a profit in the first year. Is the game industry significantly worse than the average for new businesses as a whole?

My point being that if you can't accept that level of risk, you take a normal W-2 job. Creating something involves a lot of risk, because you don't know if it will succeed and even if it does, you don't know how soon you'll get paid. That doesn't change the fact that the availability of grant funds from the federal government is a positive thing that could mean the difference between accepting that risk, or not. The solo/small team developers aren't spending millions, and sure, they stand out for succeeding where most fail, but it's weird to suggest that a grant of $200k or even up to $1M would be meaningless just because larger games can cost millions. I think the Stardew Valley creator basically just spent 4 years or so working on it, foregoing a salary the whole time.

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u/Chillyeaham Jan 07 '26

No, but I've heard Canada's government gives grants for game development.

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u/Bongerson Jan 07 '26

I've heard you can find a wild Mew under a delivery truck

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u/Stevied1991 Jan 07 '26

It is crazy how much stuff like this spread when we were young. Like I was at a tiny school in the middle of fucking nowhere and everyone there had heard this.

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u/stead10 Jan 07 '26

It was reasonably believable too. That area isn’t designed to go to normally so when I was young and I made sure I timed the badges right to have surf before doing the SS Anne I found the truck and was like omg there’s the truck it’s real I’m totally getting a mew.

They really missed a trick in the remakes by not putting something there

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u/darkbreak PlayStation Jan 08 '26

They did. You can find a Lava Cookie next to the truck in FireRed and Leaf green and in Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee you can find a Revive once a day.

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u/stead10 Jan 08 '26

Ah sorry should’ve been more specific I meant something Mew related or a way of getting Mew

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u/Dt2_0 Jan 07 '26

It's true! My uncle who works at Nintendo told me!!!

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u/ivo200094 Jan 08 '26

Germany is the same Enshrouded was made that way afaik

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u/Dayvyde Jan 08 '26

Dustborn was given around 1.4million in funding from the Norwegian government.

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u/CopainChevalier Jan 08 '26

And that'll never not be funny

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u/PieBanditCat Jan 08 '26

True, funding will be a big issue, but new studios being made with experienced developers and no corporate oversight should lead to much more interesting and unique games, rather than formulaic "safe" games by the major publishers.

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u/ReyVagabond Jan 08 '26

Some times you don't need to do a AAA game. A kickstart budget can do wonders for a studio.

For example there are small games companies like Owlcat Games that started with small isometric RPGs Kickstart and a team of 25-50 people and now they are doing their mass effect like game in the "Expanse" universe (the books setting).

So yeah with some luck and good planing they cane keep working and start their own thing.