Ubisoft Cuts 70 Jobs at the Studio Behind Its Biggest Hit in Years, Shuts Down Trials Developer Redlynx

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced should have been a good news story for Ubisoft. Instead, it's become a case study in how little box office success buys you in the games industry right now.

The remaster sold two million copies in its first day and three million within a week, and by its second week on the market it had already beaten Ubisoft's full-year sales projections for the game. Three months later, the publisher has laid off 70 people at Ubisoft Singapore, one of the studios that worked on it.

Ubisoft's statement on the cuts was brief: "At Ubisoft Singapore, 70 positions have been impacted to align the studio with upcoming production needs. The studio remains an important part of Ubisoft's global production organization."

That phrasing, aligning headcount with "upcoming production needs," is corporate shorthand for a team being bigger than the next project requires. It's also not the first time this has happened around Black Flag Resynced. Ubisoft Barcelona, another support studio that contributed to the game, lost nearly a third of its staff shortly after launch. Two studios, one hit game, two rounds of layoffs in its immediate aftermath. For a publisher that's spent the last several years absorbing one disappointment after another, shedding jobs right after finally landing a win is a tough look.

A Finnish studio reaches the end of the road

The Singapore cuts weren't the only bad news Ubisoft delivered this week. The publisher also confirmed it's closing Ubisoft Redlynx, the Finland-based studio best known for the Trials motorcycle racing series, outright.

"Today, we informed our teams of a proposal to close RedLynx in Finland, subject to the local change negotiation process, which would affect up to 52 positions," Ubisoft said.

This didn't come out of nowhere. A year ago, Ubisoft announced a "restructuring proposal" for Redlynx meant to cut costs and push for what it called "a stronger prioritization and efficiency across the company's worldwide studio network." That framing suggested the studio would shrink, not vanish. Now it's shutting down entirely.

Redlynx has a long history in the industry. Founded in 2000 and acquired by Ubisoft in 2011, the studio built its reputation on the Trials franchise, a series of physics-driven motorcycle platformers. The last mainline entry, Trials Rising, came out back in 2019. Since then, Redlynx shifted into a support role, helping out on Star Wars Outlaws and shipping the mobile title Gwen's Getaway, rather than leading its own major release.

According to a VGC report cited by PC Gamer, Ubisoft ultimately decided to close Redlynx because the studio currently has nothing else lined up to work on, and a smaller version of the team wouldn't be financially sustainable either. In other words, the restructuring plan from a year ago didn't produce a version of Redlynx that Ubisoft could justify keeping open.

Ubisoft's statement on the closure struck a similar tone to its Singapore announcement, acknowledging "the contributions" of affected employees and promising to handle the process "with care and respect." Both cuts remain subject to local negotiation processes before anything is finalized.

Why this keeps happening

Taken together, these two announcements paint an uncomfortable picture. A game outperforms expectations by a wide margin, and the studios behind it still end up smaller a few months later. A studio gets a restructuring plan meant to keep it alive, and a year later it closes anyway. Neither outcome is unique to Ubisoft, big publishers have leaned hard on layoffs and studio closures across the industry for the past few years, but the timing here is particularly stark. Black Flag Resynced is arguably Ubisoft's clearest commercial win in a long stretch of underwhelming releases, and it hasn't translated into job security for the people who made it happen.

For Redlynx specifically, the closure marks the end of a studio with roots going back a quarter century, one whose Trials games carved out a durable niche in arcade-style racing even as the series went quiet after 2019. Without a new project to anchor it, and with its post-Trials pivot into support work apparently not enough to keep the lights on, Ubisoft decided winding it down was simpler than trying to rebuild it around something new. What happens to the affected employees at both Singapore and Redlynx, and how the ongoing negotiation processes play out, is the next thing worth watching.