Ubisoft just cut another 380 people. The Winnipeg studio is dead after eight years, Belgrade is gone, and the Rainbow Six team in Montreal lost 120 heads in one swing. That’s the sixth round of layoffs in a single calendar year — sixth — and the official reason is a €1.5 billion loss and a cost-cutting plan that runs all the way to 2028. They say it like there’s no money anywhere in the building, like the doors are about to close, like everybody’s just got to understand.
Except there was money. Last fall Tencent wired €1.16 billion in cash into a brand-new Ubisoft subsidiary called Vantage, and Vantage just happens to be the box they put all the franchises that actually print cash into — Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow Six. They valued that one slice at €3.8 billion and handed the CEO’s own son a seat running it. So the family carved out the parts worth keeping, kept the surname on the door, cashed the billion-euro check, and then turned around to the people who build the games and told them, for the sixth time this year, that times are tough and the cupboard is bare.
This is the same con every time, just with a controller in its hand. “We can’t afford you” is never a fact about the bank account — it’s a decision about which rooms the money is allowed to walk into. The Guillemots protected the IP, protected the bloodline, protected the Tencent money, and the thing they decided was disposable was the person in Winnipeg who actually shipped the thing you played. A company doesn’t lose a billion euros and respond by gifting the founder’s kid the best assets and the workers a pink slip unless somebody upstairs already decided, a long time ago, whose side this was ever on. They built Assassin’s Creed. Somebody else just inherited it.