Tencent's TiMi Montréal reportedly shuts down five years after founding

TiMi Montréal, the Montreal arm of Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group founded in 2021, has reportedly been shuttered roughly five years after opening, with staff saying the studio never released a game. The claim rests on a now‑deleted LinkedIn post from a studio programmer who wrote that employees had known “for some time” and that they were “genuinely heartbroken that the public will never get to experience what this team was capable of producing.”

Attempts to view the programmer’s post now return a message reading “this post cannot be displayed,” and at least one former worker replied to the post that “This team was exceptional not just in talent, but also in camaraderie. It's one of those experiences that sticks with you for a very long time, and I feel privileged to have been a part of it.” Those lines are the clearest public traces of the closure; TiMi Studio Group and Tencent had not issued a public comment at the time the closure was reported.

TiMi Studio Group is the Tencent subsidiary behind mobile hits such as Call of Duty: Mobile, Honor of Kings, and Pokemon Unite, and the Montreal location was announced in 2021 alongside offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, Shanghai, and Chengdu. Public reporting has repeatedly tied Ashraf Ismail, the former Assassin’s Creed creative director, to TiMi Montréal since March 2021, but descriptions of his role vary between “consulting creative director,” “creative director,” and phrasing that the studio was “led by” him. Previous reports state Ismail was fired by Ubisoft Montréal in 2020 following a misconduct investigation; those details remain sensitive and have been reported in earlier coverage.

When it launched, the Montreal studio’s mandate was described as building “a AAA open world, service-focused video game for players to explore across multiple platforms.” Sources say that ambitious, service-driven open‑world project never reached a public reveal, and its current fate, whether assets, code, or IP were preserved or reassigned, is unclear.

The closure follows other high-profile studio shutdowns this year: PlayStation’s closure of Bluepoint Games, Ubisoft’s Halifax studio being shuttered, and Hasbro’s Atomic Arcade team, making TiMi Montréal the fourth studio closure reported so far in 2026. Tencent has previously closed Team Kaiju, its Los Angeles TiMi studio, in 2023, and some industry observers have pointed to a broader pullback by Chinese publishers from Western expansion. Entrepreneur David Kaye has commented on the broader trend, noting it can reflect “the whims of certain CEOs” when companies recalibrate overseas investments.

Key questions remain: there is no corporate confirmation of the shutdown, no public headcount or severance details, and no clear record of what happened to the unannounced project. Until TiMi Studio Group or Tencent provide an official statement, the five-year run of a Montreal studio that promised a major AAA open‑world service game but shipped nothing leaves the project’s and the team’s work in limbo.