Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was a big hit, and now it's time for big layoffs at the studio that made it | Ubisoft has also decided to close Trials studio Ubisoft Redlynx entirely.

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The post release firing of half a team seems to just be standard practice at the big companies, success or failure.

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u/HotwheelsSisyphus 8h ago

Fuck longterm, profits now

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u/AkodoRyu 8h ago edited 8h ago

This is literally long-term decision, because Singapore will likely be full-time support studio, and will no longer make entire games. And Ubisoft no longer have money to support people they don't need.

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u/Stolehtreb 7h ago

Way to gobble up that koolaid. Long term, you want a team that works well together and has experience together. If a team has to relearn how to work with each other every time, you end up with a shit product. There is nothing long term about laying off after every release. At all.

Look at Capcom. FromSoft. That’s what long term holding onto staff gets you.

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u/Hopesfallout 7h ago

Indeed. And this used to be a thing you could observe in studios all the time during the 90s and 2000s: amateurs and individuals growing into expert, well-oiled developer teams.

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u/eastpole 7h ago

You think companies should support the same staff regardless of their needs? That's an interesting thought

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u/WalkFreeeee 7h ago edited 6h ago

If the company has "no need" for a staff that just delivered a high quality, high result product, the company's needs are very poorly managed. it's not like Ubisoft isn't making more games.

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u/AkodoRyu 7h ago

Look at those successful companies that print money. Also, small companies (relatively).

Ubisoft had to pay, before the reductions, for more than 5x more people than Capcom, and 40x as many as FromSoftware. Capcom can operate for more than 4.5 years for what Ubisoft had to spend every year before the reductions. From can basically operate indefinitely.

Let's see the games (big ones) that Capcom managed to release in the last 4.5 years:

Street Fighter 6 (2023)

Resident Evil 4 Remake (2023)

Dragon's Dogma II (2024)

Monster Hunter Wilds (2025)

Resident Evil Requiem (2026)

PRAGMATA (2026)

Onimusha: Way of the Sword (2026)

Now let's see what Ubisoft released in the last 12 months:

Assassin's Creed Shadows (March 2025)

Anno 117: Pax Romana (November 2025)

Rayman: 30th Anniversary Edition (February 2026)

The Division Resurgence (April 2026)

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced (July 2026)

You see now why Ubisoft needs to fire a lot of people? The money just doesn't add up.

Ubisoft was making (allegedly) 20-40 games at the same time at its peak, and now it has cancelled at least half of those. The fact that it hasn't yet fired a few more thousand people already suggests, to me, that it is being very cautious about reductions.

And while the Black Flag remake was a success, let's not forget that this is the team responsible for Skull & Bones. Those are definitely not the best and the brightest in the industry, and I doubt Ubisoft will risk giving them another full game to make at this point in time.

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u/Stolehtreb 6h ago

The number of games they are making doesn’t matter. What did those teams consists of? Largely teams that were working together for the first time.

You want to defend the culture of laying off staff on every release but you get poor products that way. Ubisoft themself are a HUGE example of this.

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u/AkodoRyu 6h ago

When you drown you don't have a luxury of picking between options. The number of games, and the fact that none of them was a big hit, represents that there is no cash inflow. They are not firing people "to increase profit", they are firing people to survive.

And even with Black Flag being a minor success, with Skull & Bones costs on top, they probably owe Ubi at least a few tens of million more.

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u/Silent-Act191 7h ago edited 7h ago

What long term profit are these people bringing to the table when the project they worked on has been completed, released and the studio doesn't have a new project to work on?

Like i'm not going to be surprised that a movie studio lays-off a significant part of the crew after a big movie has wrapped filming.

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u/Then-Understanding85 7h ago

All of the institutional knowledge that leads to the next product being better…

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u/Silent-Act191 7h ago

But they don't have a next product in the making?

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u/cerealbh 8h ago

Yes, you don't need as many bodies to maintain something vs create. this is 100 a feature not a defect.

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u/BalanceJazzlike5116 4h ago

Yeah this is strange. Nobody says “avengers makes box office records as entire crew laid off”. Their work is done.

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u/SirkutBored 8h ago

Average tenure of a corporate employee is now under 3 years before having to find another job.

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u/Turkino 8h ago

That's generally how things used to be in the video games industry 15+ years ago. Soon as a project is over, everyone gets laid off. Only over the past decade and a half have some of the larger studios got big and successful enough to generally try to keep people around to work on the next thing but that seems to be swinging back the other way now.

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u/WillametteSalamandOR 7h ago

It’s weird to me that that’s something people don’t grasp with creative endeavors. Do they think movie production companies pay all the staff for a movie forever and just keep them around? Nobody is up in arms when the key grip from the latest Disney movie is out of work once it’s in the can.

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u/Gastroid 7h ago

Nobody is up in arms when the key grip from the latest Disney movie is out of work once it's in the can.

Nobody is up in arms because the Hollywood system has been designed to cope with the ebs and flows of production. All those technical jobs are unionized, with high base pay, pensions, benefits banking and dedicated relief funds to help cover the gaps between projects. That key grip, just wrapping up on a major movie, has a support structure to soften the blow.

At these gaming studios, there are no industry-wide union benefits, no pension to rely on, jobs are competitive and shrinking, and it's so easy (and a much better career move) for a talented programmer to leave the games industry entirely and translate their talents working on industrial air conditioning control software or something.

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u/Turkino 7h ago

Don't get me wrong, I like having consistent work and a paycheck over the contract-based version that it used to be.

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u/SoftcoreEcchi 7h ago

With the film industry, it used to be that there were a few major areas it was concentrated in, LA, Atlanta, etc, so when the crew is done with one project there ideally wouldnt be a huge gap until the next project comes along. You could work TV, movies, short films etc, without having to move cities or states for every new job. Its even harder now to be in that industry, but with gaming you have studios all over the place. Its not an industry where you could work for 10 different studios/productions and stay in the same house like you could have in the film industry. On top of that the film industry by and large has skills that are always applicable across different projects, you can go from rigging up lighting for a commercial, then for a movie, and vice versa without needing to learn a totally different way of doing things. In games however, it depends on what engines you’re working with, and if you’re developing a game with an engine other than Unreal, theres going to be a fairly long learning/break in period for new hires, because they need to get up to speed with whatever you’re developing on. Gaming is not nearly as standardized as the film industry is. Another factor is the length of time they’re employed, if your crew for a film, you’ll be working on the project for between a few weeks or a few months before moving onto a different project, as opposed to the years it takes for games to come together. They aren’t comparable industries at all.

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u/SGRM_ 6h ago

Japanese studios don't do this.

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u/DUH455T 7h ago

They're contractors.

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u/adavidmiller 8h ago

Yeah, the firing itself doesn't really seem like an issue to me, regardless. Like, that's how a lot of fields work, a big project comes along, a lot of people get hired, they last for the project. Going directly into another equally big or bigger project isn't a common guarantee, and you're not going to keep people on for jobs that don't exist.

I'm certainly for success-based compensation as part of these hiring packages and would assume that wasn't the case for most of the average employees, But that seems a bit more of its own topic than just "Ubisoft bad"

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u/KickBalls80 8h ago

People don't go into game dev for a long term job. This is really nothing new. I imagine it does suck. I've been laid off before. The difference is they have this to put on the resume

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u/PharmyC 8h ago

What? You have any work you do to put on a resume. Why would that be a consolation?

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u/KickBalls80 8h ago

Because you sign up for a project. When it's done it's natural to move on. And collect royalties.

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u/thatgirlzhao 1h ago

As someone who works in big tech, the gaming industry genuinely seems like the worst of the worst. For over a decade now they have had the practice of mass firings after projects. I do not understand why they don’t just move to a project based employment model. Probably hard to attract talent. Game engineers really should unionize, the repeated mistreatment of them is not okay. I don’t know anyone who works in the gaming industry who hasn’t been laid off before.

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u/Galacix 7h ago

They need to make it clear and hire these developers as temporary contractors. The video game industry is closer to Hollywood nowadays where big game projects mean lots of new staff, with minimal support teams.

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u/MTwist 8h ago

Sold 2 million copies in a day, 3 million copies in a week, surpassed annual expectations in two weeks, get fired.

In capitalism, you get rewarded if you work hard and the boss takes all the risks.

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

[deleted]

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u/NonMagical 7h ago edited 7h ago

I don’t know how game development jobs work, but there is no way a random developer is getting fucking royalties lol

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u/[deleted] 7h ago

[deleted]

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u/NonMagical 7h ago

A quick google search easily refutes that likelihood. If you got royalties for a job you were paid to do and didn’t own, you lucked out that the actual owner didn’t know what they were doing.

More likely you are just full of it though.

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u/Silent-Act191 7h ago

Under what impression are you that these people are getting royalties? Because i highly doubt that Ubisoft has that in their employment contracts.

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u/[deleted] 7h ago

[deleted]

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u/Silent-Act191 7h ago

Try doing at least a little bit of research

I did, i could find no evidence that royalties are a industry standard or even common. The could maybe be found at a small indie studio, but not a massive developer like Ubisoft.

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u/mca1169 8h ago

what a fucked world we live in. the game did great! your reward is instantly getting fired.

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u/Status_Confidence_26 5h ago edited 22m ago

What would you suggest as a solution? Once a game is finished, they don’t need the manpower to build it anymore. I agree it sucks that this is what developers are dealing with but I don’t know how to fix it.

Edit: I know this is reddit, but man I was just trying to ask what possible solutions there are.

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u/Zayl 3h ago

Gee Wizz maybe they could get started on the next project like an AC1 remake and then Ezio Trilogy remakes or something like that since people are always asking for em.

At the very least bake in some of the profits for the devs. After all, they are the reason the game exists.

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u/GroundbreakingPage41 3h ago

Maybe move on to the next project and keep good games coming?

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u/Mikeavelli 2h ago

Literally every other industry has figured out how to transition workers onto new projects after their previous project ends.

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u/Status_Confidence_26 2h ago

How does the movie industry do it?

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u/dukearcher 8h ago

I'm kinda hoping the gaming industry simply fails at this point. I can live without AAA games.

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u/davenobody 7h ago

Would be wonderful to see more innovation in gameplay and lower quality visual content. That was and still is the Nintendo model.

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u/dukearcher 5h ago

Nintendo are not the corporation to worship that's for sure

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u/davenobody 5h ago

It is a strategy they employed for years. Now not so much. But the Wii and DS were definitely more about fun games. Now they seem to be milking the catalog more than delivering fun games. I think it is just where the industry is right now. Milking the vast catalog of IP is more attractive than doing something new.

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u/thatirishguyyyyy 7h ago

I yearn for a reality where the worker is valued over the CEO that didn't do jack shit.

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u/leviathab13186 6h ago

I have a feeling this is going to be the norm. They are going to replace them with contract workers that they just end their contract the moment games are done. I wouldnt be surprised if quality takes a huge hit as experience does not persist from game to game.

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u/OkayyBeta 24m ago

If any RedLynx devs happen to be scanning the comments: I fuckin' told you. I told you the moment you shook Ubisoft's damp, slimy hand that it was all downhill from there.

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u/bigfuzzydog 7h ago

The big game companies dont make good games anymore. There is no more passion in what they build. They all just try to squeeze as much money as possible out of a game while stifling the passion and creativity of their workers just so they can lay them off down the line. There is a reason the indie game scene has been popping over the last few years. The indie devs still build games that they actually want to build. They take risks and put out games with new ideas and have the freedom to get creative. They are what these companies used to be back before it was all about battle passes, season passes, and skins. I say let the big companies die so the indie devs can rise and lets just hope they dont make the same mistakes when they grow

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u/Fun-Wash7545 3h ago

I think that game was overhyped. I couldn't finish it, I was bored. Every single mission was the exact same thing. The cake on top was farming the Templar keys only to realize the reward was just a lame ass cosmetic. That's when I dropped the game, boring ass repetitive actions, how's that ever praised I'll never understand it

Business Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced was a big hit, and now it's time for big layoffs at the studio that made it | Ubisoft has also decided to close Trials studio Ubisoft Redlynx entirely.

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