Ubisoft shutters Winnipeg and Belgrade studios, cuts up to 380 jobs

Ubisoft’s decision to shutter its Winnipeg and Belgrade studios, while proposing further cuts across Barcelona and its global publishing business, marks one of the sharpest signals yet that the company is still tightening around a smaller set of priority projects. The restructuring could eliminate as many as 380 roles companywide, following a January reset that reorganized Ubisoft around five creative houses and a May report of a record annual loss of almost 1.5 billion euros for FY2025-26.

The Winnipeg closure is especially consequential for workers in support production. The studio opened in 2019 and had become part of the pipeline on titles including Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Rainbow Six Mobile. About 65 employees were affected there, a reminder that studios far from a game’s creative center can still be exposed when publishers start consolidating work and narrowing their portfolio.

Ubisoft said internally that it had been evolving the organization to “simplify how it operates, reduce its cost base, and strengthen the company for the long term.” That language matches a familiar pattern across the industry: when budgets tighten, publishers often protect a handful of franchises while trimming the satellite teams, co-development partners and publishing functions that keep live games and release schedules moving. In practical terms, that leaves QA, localization, production coordination and other support roles carrying more risk than their distance from headquarters might suggest.

The new cuts follow an earlier Halifax closure in January, which eliminated 71 jobs. Halifax workers had formed Ubisoft’s first North American union shortly before the shutdown, and staff later said they felt blindsided when the office was closed. That sequence matters beyond one studio. It shows how quickly labor organizing, site closures and strategic resets can collide when a publisher decides to rebalance its cost structure.

For Nintendo, the warning is not about a copycat crisis but about resilience. Nintendo said in November 2025 that it would acquire shares of Bandai Namco Studios Singapore to strengthen its development structure, and its developer portal says it supports both companies and individuals working on Nintendo platforms. Nintendo’s procurement policy also stresses fair evaluation, compliance and trust with production partners. The contrast is instructive: a quality-first culture still depends on how work is distributed, documented and protected. When that system leans too hard on fragile assumptions, even large publishers can find their pipelines exposed.