Combined with layoffs at the publisher’s Barcelona studio, the number of affected employees could reach 380.
Ubisoft is continuing to downsize, with reports of additional studio closures and employee layoffs coming in on Wednesday. Ubisoft Winnipeg and Ubisoft Belgrade are being shut down outright while the publisher’s Barcelona studio will be laying off an unspecified number of employees.
According to a report from Game Developer, the Winnipeg and Belgrade studio closures and Barcelona downsizing could result in up to 380 people being out of work. Barcelona is mainly being kept open to support the Rainbow Six series, in which Siege is continuing on into Year 11. Ubisoft Winnipeg helped develop the publisher’s Anvil and Snowdrop engines, which has been used in many Ubisoft titles. Ubisoft Belgrade had acted as a support studio for many of the publisher’s ongoing titles. The situation in Winnipeg is worth highlighting, in particular, because Ubisoft had pledged to grow the Winnipeg team to 300 employees before 2030 and invest $264 million in the Manitoba province. This happened three years after the Winnipeg studio originally opened in 2018.
The relationship between Ubisoft management and labor has grown increasingly fractured this year. The year began with the company closing Halifax Studio, a move that came weeks after employees in that studio voted to unionize. Hundreds of Ubisoft employees later took part in an international strike, which ran from February 10-12, protesting CEO Yves Guillemot’s studio closures and return-to-office edict that effective ends remote work at the company. A month after the strike, Ubisoft ended game development at Red Storm, reducing it to a support studio and laying off 105 employees. The clash between Ubisoft management and labor comes as the company’s 2025 ended with Ubisoft securing a 1.16 billion euro deal with Tencent.
Ubisoft has Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced and Rayman Legends Retold on its 2026 docket, but its future looks muddier as the company continues to lay off employees, shutter studios, and antagonize its remaining labor force. We’ll continue to watch this story for further developments.
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Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can’t enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?
