Ubisoft Montreal just laid off 98 people as part of a corporate restructuring and reorganization effort, as reported by Kotaku. The cuts primarily impact workers in business administration services and IT. Ubisoft says it will support “all affected Canadian employees” with severance packages and “career assistance to help them navigate their transition.”
The Montreal office is widely considered to be the most reputable subsidiary of Ubisoft and its largest in-house development team, employing around 4,000 people. Ubisoft Montreal is responsible for many of the company’s big-wig franchises, from Assassin’s Creed to Far Cry and Rainbow Six Siege.
Ubisoft wrote in a statement provided to Kotaku that it feels the “utmost gratitude and respect” for the impacted employees and noted that these cuts do not extend to the various production teams, likely to assuage consumers worried about game delays. In addition to the 98 that have already been let go, Ubisoft Montreal anticipates about two dozen more layoffs in the near future.
Ubisoft has been on a firing spree this past year, laying off over 1,000 people from its various global branches, according to its most recent earnings report. This has led to some game cancellations, like the arena battler Project Q, among others. Despite these layoffs, the company still employs over 19,000 people worldwide.
This is, of course, part of a larger trend that finds multiple game studios laying off people as a cost cutting measure. Epic Games slashed its workforce by 16 percent earlier this year and CD Projekt Red, the company behind Cyberpunk 2077, laid off 100 employees back in July. The same thing has been happening across the entire tech space, as Google, Microsoft, Meta, IBM and many more companies turned 2023 into a bonanza of pink slips.
