Ubisoft’s Red Storm Entertainment Was Reportedly Working on At Least 10 Games Before it Was Hit With Mass Layoffs

Last week, we learned that Red Storm Entertainment would no longer make games and would become a full-time tech support studio following a mass layoff of 105 developers. The studio was initially founded by Tom Clancy back in 1996, and was the original home of the first Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games before Ubisoft acquired the studio in 2000 and continued making games based on Clancy’s popular novels.

To see its game development history come to a close in such an unceremonious way was disappointing, along with the fact that once again, more than 100 people would be losing their livelihoods as Ubisoft continued its restructuring following the announcement of a “major reset” back in January.

While it was unclear what Red Storm Entertainment was working on before its game development operations were essentially shuttered, a new report from Insider-Gaming (who have a history of accurately reporting non-public information specifically about Ubisoft) reveals that it was actually working on quite a bit.

Red Storm hadn’t been the lead on a project (that made it to release) since Ghost Recon: Future Soldier back in 2012, and had long been a support studio working on pretty much every game that carried the Tom Clancy banner, and whatever else Ubisoft needed from it. Its most recent project lead was The Division Heartland, which was cancelled as part of Ubisoft’s plans to reinvest in Rainbow Six Siege and XDefiant, the latter of which was also eventually cancelled, though at least XDefiant made it out the door.

According to Insider-Gaming, Red Storm’s list of projects it had on the go included:

• Rainbow Six Siege seasonal content
• The next mainline Ghost Recon game under alleged codename Project OVR
• Brawlhalla
• Beyond Good & Evil 2
• Unannounced XCOM-style Rainbow Six game allegedly called Slice & Dice
• The Division 2 audio work
• Splinter Cell
• Concept work for The Division 3
• Unannounced Watch Dogs Director’s Cut support
• Unannounced project currently in concept phase

That’s at least 10 projects the studio was running support on, according to the report. Though it also highlights part of why Ubisoft made the decision it did, as its new structure of splitting teams into ‘Creative Houses’ that each control various IPs doesn’t support a single studio that works across multiple projects that are now in separate Creative Houses.

Pair that with the fact that Ubisoft is looking to cut €200 million in costs, and it’s not hard to see how Ubisoft comes to the conclusion of ceasing game development operations at Red Storm, while keeping its technical know-how around so it can still support other teams with things like the Snowdrop engine and other general IT issues.

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