Ubisoft closes Winnipeg and Belgrade studios, reshapes Rainbow Six Mobile teams

Ubisoft’s shutdown of its Winnipeg and Belgrade studios landed with a much bigger message than headcount alone: the company is tightening around the brands it considers worth protecting, and Rainbow Six sits near the top of that list. The restructuring could affect up to 380 roles across the business, but for mobile players the sharper signal is how aggressively Ubisoft is shifting people around Rainbow Six Siege Mobile and the wider Siege pipeline rather than treating the mobile project as a separate growth lane.

Ubisoft Winnipeg, founded in 2018, had been a support studio with a heavy open-world focus and credits on Rainbow Six Siege, XDefiant, Far Cry 6 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Its own site had recently pointed to a closer link with mobile, including February 23 and February 26 posts about Rainbow Six Mobile and a feature, How Rainbow Six Mobile was Designed for Real Mobile Play. Those posts, along with the studio’s Tools team work on the game, showed how embedded Winnipeg had become in the mobile adaptation before the closure hit.

The cuts were not limited to Manitoba. Ubisoft’s wider restructuring also included the shutdown of Ubisoft Belgrade, cuts to global publishing teams and a reshaping of Ubisoft Barcelona around Rainbow Six projects. About 65 employees at Winnipeg were believed to have lost their jobs, and former staff described the closure on LinkedIn as they moved on to other studios. Earlier layoffs had already hit San Francisco, Halifax and Abu Dhabi, underlining how broad the reset has become.

The staffing shifts around Rainbow Six itself are the part mobile players should watch most closely. Around 120 Rainbow Six Siege developers at Ubisoft Montreal were being ramped off the project, while around 50 people were moved off Rainbow Six Siege Mobile and an unannounced project. Ubisoft treated those moves as reassignments rather than layoffs at that stage, and an Ubisoft source said Rainbow Six Siege remains a strong brand, with the changes reflecting evolving priorities and operational needs.

That leaves Rainbow Six Mobile in a revealing position. Ubisoft’s January 21, 2026 organizational, operational and portfolio reset was framed as an effort to restore sustainable growth, and this latest round shows that the company is still choosing fewer, larger bets over broad experimentation. For mobile, that usually means one thing: support, features and long-term cadence will follow wherever Ubisoft believes the main franchise is safest, not wherever a spinoff looks easiest to grow.