The trend of layoffs at major video game developers and publishers continued this week, this time affecting a number of people working at Ubisoft. Bloomberg reported that 45 team members from that company were laid off on Friday.
Some were located at Ubisoft’s San Fransico offices, and the rest were in Cary, North Carolina, the location of the publisher’s Red Storm Entertainment development studio.
A Ubisoft spokesperson told Bloomberg:
This difficult yet necessary decision was made to align these studios’ organizations with their future business and development objectives. We are committed to providing comprehensive support to those affected, including severance and career assistance, and we thank them for their many contributions to Ubisoft.
Earlier this year, Ubisoft announced it had canceled the development of The Division Heartland. The game, which was first announced in 2021, was in development at Red Storm and was planned as a free-to-play spin-off title of the popular action-RPG shooter series. At the time, Ubisoft said that members of that game’s team were being moved to work on other projects, such as Rainbow Six: Siege and XDefiant.
Ubisoft still has a couple of major game projects due out sometime before the rest of 2024. One that’s coming in just a few days is Star Wars Outlaws. The open-world game, developed by The Division’s Massive Entertainment, will be officially released on August 30.
The other major game release from Ubisoft this year is Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The next game in the company’s popular historical stealth action game series has generated some unwanted publicity as some people feel that the game’s depiction of the character of Yasuke as a Black samurai ignores the real history of feudal Japan. Ubisoft has responded with the argument that it is making a game with a fictional story, rather than making a 100 percent accurate historical document. The game is due for release on November 15.
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