Two Ubisoft studios have announced plans to cut back staff, though one of them is trying to encourage people to lay themselves off in the form of “a voluntary career transition program”. The studios in question are Ubisoft Massive – creators of Tom Clancy’s The Division, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – and Ubisoft Redlynx, creators of the multiplayer gadabout Trials biking games.
Yesterday, a Massive representative posted on LinkedIn that “[as] part of our ongoing evolution and long-term planning, we have recently realigned our teams and resources to strengthen our roadmap, ensuring our continued focus on The Division franchise and the technologies, including Snowdrop and Ubisoft Connect, that power our games.
“To support this transition responsibly,” the post goes on, “we introduced a voluntary career transition program, giving eligible team members the opportunity to take their next career step on their own terms, supported by a comprehensive package that includes financial and career assistance.”
It’s good that people are getting some apparently decent severance in return for realigning themselves into the rubbish bin, but that may not be much consolation for developers weighing the odds of future, involuntary layoffs on less favourable terms. Massive haven’t specified how many roles they hope to cut, and at what point they will deem themselves to have been sufficiently “realigned”. Quit now for a juicier leaving package, or stick around because you enjoy your job and thereby, increase the odds of being sacked down the road?
Massive haven’t had a brilliant couple of years. Last year’s Star Wars: Outlaws was much-hyped, as you might expect given that it’s an open world game bearing the stamp of Lucas, but it proved to be merely a “perfectly OK bit of Star War” and had a “softer than expected” launch. Its commercial struggles were a big factor in Ubisoft’s decision to delay Assassin’s Creed Shadows until they could be sure of doing the right numbers. Massive’s current projects include Tom Clancy’s The Division 3, announced in 2023. We’ve heard little about it since. The Division 2 was said to be performing “strongly” in the company’s most recent earnings report, but that’s following Ubisoft’s closure of one of the game’s support studios in January.
All the above doom-mongering notwithstanding, the Massive people potentially affected are definitely in a happier situation than their colleagues at RedLynx. Ubisoft have just announced a “restructuring proposal” for the studio, to be thrashed out in collective negotiations with staff. Said negotiations primarily “concern the production and administration teams”, and are all in the name of transforming Redlynx “from a multiplatform setup to a studio specialized in small screens”.
The post adds that Redlynx have “two unannounced mobile projects” in the offing, in addition to a technology team who work on Ubisoft’s Snowdrop game engine. The proposal aims to trim the books by a maximum of 60 members of staff, and the negotiations are scheduled to run from October 30th till end of November.
While the chief worry here is how many people will lose their livelihoods, I’m also saddened to hear that Ubisoft want Redlynx to shift away from PC and console, inasmuch as it means RPS will have less opportunity to write about Trials, a wonderfully daft party game.
It’s of course noteworthy that neither Redlynx nor Massive appear to be part of Ubisoft’s new Tencent-backed subsidiary, now called Vantage Studios, which is dedicated to Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six – videogame series Tencent regard as the juiciest parts of the Ubisoft pineapple. Anything that falls outside that core money-spinning operation appears to be more in danger of “realignment”. In July, Ubisoft announced that they would reorganise the rest of their operation into “creative houses”, with a view to being more “agile” and “focussed”. Best of luck to all the rank-and-file devs mixed up in all this.
