In November 2024, Ubisoft closed its San Francisco and Osaka studios. That was the start. By June 2026, the company had shut down six studios in total, cut over 1,200 jobs across three continents, cancelled six games in active development, and posted a record €1.3 billion operating loss for fiscal 2025-26. Its stock is down roughly 93% from its 2018 peak. CEO Yves Guillemot is still in his chair, just about.
What follows is a full account of every round of cuts, what the company said about them, what employees said about them, and what is left of the game slate afterward.
The Closures, Round by Round
The first two studios went in November 2024. San Francisco, around 143 jobs. Osaka, roughly 134 when combined with a simultaneous scale-down in Sydney. Ubisoft described both as part of a broader cost restructuring. Neither had publicly announced projects at the time.
January 2025 brought the Leamington closure in the UK, about 50 staff, alongside cuts at Düsseldorf, Stockholm, and Newcastle's Reflections studio. Total across those sites: roughly 185 jobs.
The pace picked up through late 2025. Ubisoft Massive in Malmö launched what it called a "voluntary career transition" program in October, offering buyouts ahead of planned reductions. RedLynx in Helsinki proposed cutting up to 60 roles around the same time. In November, 29 staff at the Abu Dhabi mobile studio were let go, with Ubisoft saying its focus there would shift entirely to Growtopia.
Then January 2026, and the cuts that made the most noise. On January 7, Ubisoft closed its Halifax studio, 71 positions. Halifax had voted 74% in favour of unionizing just weeks earlier, making it the first unionized Ubisoft studio in the industry. The timing was not lost on anyone. Quebec's CWA union called it "devastating" and said it was pursuing legal options. Ubisoft said the closure was about costs. On January 13, another 55 roles went at Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Stockholm.
February: 40 jobs cut at Ubisoft Toronto, described by the company as part of its "cost-savings plan" following the January reorganization. March: Ubisoft ended active game development at Red Storm Entertainment, the studio behind the original Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon. 105 jobs cut. Red Storm was moved into a support role. The Tom Clancy connection, decades of it, effectively ended there.
June 10, 2026 brought the most recent wave. Winnipeg shut down, roughly 65 jobs. Belgrade closed. Barcelona was restructured with 51 positions eliminated, its remaining team pointed entirely at Rainbow Six Siege. In Montreal, 120 Siege developers and 50 Rainbow Six Mobile developers were reassigned off those projects. Ubisoft is careful not to call those layoffs. They were reassignments. Whether those people end up with roles they want is a different question.
Halifax voted to unionize in late 2025. Ubisoft closed the studio weeks later. The company said it was about costs. The union said it was about the vote. That dispute is now in front of lawyers.
What Ubisoft Said vs. What Happened
On January 21, 2026, Guillemot announced what he called a "major organizational reset." Ubisoft would be divided into five genre-focused Creative Houses. Six games were being cancelled. Seven more were delayed. The company was targeting €1.25 billion in fixed costs by 2028. The press release used the phrase "cost reduction and efficiency." It did not use the word layoff.
Internally, the picture was messier. Leaked memos and employee accounts described staff learning about the reorganization at the same time the press did. In Paris, 200 headquarters roles were reportedly targeted for "voluntary departure," a phrase that appeared repeatedly in internal communications. At Massive, a senior figure posted on LinkedIn that teams had been "realigned" on the same day internal emails were circulating about the cuts. The Assassin's Creed director Marc-Alexis Côté had been publicly described as leaving voluntarily in October 2025. He later filed a lawsuit alleging he was forced out.
CFO Frédérick Duguet confirmed the €1.3 billion operating loss in Euronext filings and warned of another loss-making year in 2026-27, even as Ubisoft announced a €1.16 billion investment from Tencent into a new entity called Vantage Studios covering its flagship franchises. That investment arrived in November 2025. The restructuring continued anyway.
The Games That Did Not Make It
Six titles in active development were cancelled in the January 2026 announcement. Ubisoft publicly named one: the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, a project that had been in development for years and delayed multiple times. The other five were not officially named, though reports identify them as three new IP projects, a mobile game, and the Splinter Cell VR game that had been in development at Red Storm. That last one died with the studio's game development arm in March.
Tom Clancy's The Division: Heartland was also cancelled, confirmed separately. It had been in some form of development since 2021.
Seven further titles were delayed. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag "Resynced" was pushed from early summer to July 2026. Future Far Cry and Ghost Recon projects were reportedly deferred into 2027 or later. The near-term release slate is thin: AC Black Flag Resynced, Rainbow Six Mobile, The Division Resurgence, and a handful of mobile titles including Might and Magic Fates. That is about it.
Rainbow Six Siege lost roughly 12% of its Montreal development team through reassignment. Ubisoft Barcelona, formerly a broader studio, is now a Siege-only operation. The Winnipeg studio, which housed the Rainbow Six Mobile team, was closed four months after that game launched in February 2026. The 50 mobile developers there were transferred out of the project.
The Division: Heartland was in development for five years. The Splinter Cell VR project never got announced. The Prince of Persia remake was delayed so many times that when the cancellation came, some fans had stopped being surprised. That does not make it less of a loss.
The Money
Ubisoft's stock was trading above €100 in 2018. By late January 2026, after Guillemot's restructuring announcement sent shares down roughly 34% in a single day, its largest one-day drop ever, the market cap had fallen to somewhere between €600 million and €850 million. That is a 93% decline over eight years.
Revenue for fiscal 2025-26 fell around 17-22% year-on-year to approximately €1.4-1.5 billion in net bookings. The company forecasts continued losses in 2026-27, projecting a sales decline of 8-9% and a cash burn of up to €500 million, before returning to profitability in 2027-28. Whether that timeline holds depends on how the reduced slate performs.
Star Wars Outlaws underperformed significantly in 2024. Skull and Bones was a commercial failure after years of development. Assassin's Creed Shadows had a complicated launch. The pattern across several consecutive releases of high cost, high expectation, and disappointing sales is what created the conditions for the current cuts. Tencent's investment buys time. It does not fix the underlying question of whether Ubisoft's remaining projects can bring players back.
Unions, Strikes, and What Employees Are Saying
Five French unions, including the CGT and CFDT, called a three-day strike from February 10-12, 2026. Around 1,200 Ubisoft workers participated globally. The demands included an end to the cuts, reversal of a five-day return-to-office mandate, and Guillemot's resignation. He did not resign.
Union statements described management's approach as springing decisions on employees "at the same time as the press." Remote work agreements that had been in place since the pandemic were being unilaterally overridden. In France, Stop Killing Games activists and labor organizers filed separate legal complaints over studio closures.
Guillemot remained in place through mid-2026. Publicly, employees at multiple studios have used the word "catastrophic" to describe internal morale. That is not a leak or a hot take. It is what people are saying on LinkedIn and in interviews with games press, using their real names.
Where the Company Goes From Here
The Creative Houses model reorganizes Ubisoft into five genre-focused divisions, meant to consolidate decision-making and reduce the overhead of running dozens of semi-independent studios. Former Tencent and Riot exec Nicolo Laurent joined as an adviser on major franchises. Massive Entertainment's Thomas Andrén was appointed GM of the cross-studio Creative Network. The Rainbow Six Siege Creative Director Alexander Karpazis stepped down, with Joshua Mills named as replacement in June 2026.
The stated plan is a leaner company built around proven franchises and live-service titles, with shared talent pools across Creative Houses replacing the old studio-by-studio model. Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow Six, and The Division are the anchors. New IP is not part of the near-term roadmap, at least not publicly.
Whether that works depends on execution Ubisoft has not yet demonstrated. Several of the franchises being bet on are the same ones that underperformed over the past three years. The talent lost across the closed studios, Red Storm's institutional knowledge of the Tom Clancy universe, the Halifax team that had just organized and was cut before it could advocate for itself, is not easily replaced. The 2027-28 recovery projection assumes the remaining teams can deliver under significant pressure with fewer resources than they had before.
It might work out. Ubisoft has been in difficult positions before. But the scale of what has been cut, the studios, the games, the people, is not a "restructuring" in the way that word usually gets used. It is a company that got too big, made too many expensive bets that did not pay off, and is now trying to survive by becoming much smaller. Whether the smaller version of Ubisoft can still make the games that built its reputation is the question the next two years will answer.
