Ubisoft Ends Game Development at Red Storm Entertainment, Laying Off 105 Employees

The studio that gave the world Rainbow Six and the original Ghost Recon series will never ship another game. Ubisoft announced Thursday that it is ending game development at Red Storm Entertainment, the North Carolina studio co-founded by author Tom Clancy in 1996, laying off all 105 of its game developers as part of the company's global cost-savings restructure.

Red Storm's remaining staff will continue working in a support capacity, handling global IT operations and ongoing work on Ubisoft's Snowdrop engine, the technology that powered Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Every game developer at the studio has been made redundant, with the 105 affected employees receiving severance and career transition assistance.

The decision is part of Ubisoft's global cost-savings plan announced in January 2026, a sweeping "major reset" that has already produced the cancellation of six games, the postponement of seven others, and two studio closures. The company is targeting a reduction in fixed costs of an additional €200 million over the next two years, and has separately proposed eliminating up to 200 jobs at its Paris headquarters, roughly 18% of that office's staff.

For Red Storm specifically, the closure of its development operations caps a painful final chapter. The studio's last shipped title was Assassin's Creed Nexus VR in 2023. Before that, two projects died in development: an untitled Splinter Cell VR game canceled in 2022, and The Division Heartland, a free-to-play take on the loot-shooter series that was canceled in 2024. Red Storm also contributed to XDefiant, which Ubisoft shut down last year.

That run of cancellations stands in contrast to a legacy built over nearly three decades. Founded in 1996 and named after Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising, the studio developed the original Rainbow Six, created the first Ghost Recon and numerous sequels through the 2000s, and contributed to Ghost Recon: Future Soldier in 2012 and Tom Clancy's The Division in 2016. More recently it developed VR titles including Werewolves Within, later adapted into a 2021 comedy horror film, and Star Trek: Bridge Crew.

Red Storm's closure is not an isolated event within Ubisoft's 2026 restructure. Earlier this year, Ubisoft shuttered its Halifax studio weeks after workers there voted to unionize. In November 2025, the company quietly cut 29 employees at its Abu Dhabi studio. Just last month, Ubisoft Toronto laid off 40 employees. Together with the Red Storm cuts, the layoffs reflect a company-wide contraction that Ubisoft has framed through its reorganization into autonomous "creative houses."

That reorganization moved forward this week as well, with Ubisoft naming Julien Bares, the former head of development at Tencent Games Global, as general manager of Creative Houses 3 and 5. Creative House 3 oversees live-service titles including For Honor, The Crew, Riders Republic, Brawlhalla, and Skull and Bones, while Creative House 5 handles casual brands such as Just Dance and Idle Miner Tycoon.

Red Storm was approaching its 30th anniversary. Instead of marking that milestone with a new release, the studio built on Tom Clancy's name will keep the lights on maintaining servers and engine code for other teams' games.