Ubisoft Looks to More Layoffs and a Return-to-Office Mandate to Drive “Collective Efficiency, Creativity, and Success”

Update 02/02/2026: Unsurprisingly, the changes coming from this reset have not gone over well with some Ubisoft employees, and now, a team lead from Ubisoft Montreal, David Michaud-Cromp, has been fired for critical comments he made on his LinkedIn account on the new RTO mandate. You can check out the full story here.

Original Story:

Ubisoft dropped a bombshell of an announcement today, cancelling six projects, including the long-awaited Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake, delaying seven more, and restructuring the entire company into five separate Creative Houses. Those are the basic facts of what's changed for Ubisoft. As to how it'll execute and drive this new structure, the answer for Ubisoft appears to lie within more layoffs, a return-to-office mandate, and increased investments in what it deems to be "cutting-edge technology," namely investing further in "player-facing Generative AI."

Firstly, the basic structure of Ubisoft as a company is changing. It's moving to a decentralized model, with five Creative Houses that will sit under Ubisoft headquarters, each with its own financial responsibilities and total creative ownership of the brands and IPs held within each Creative House. Supporting each Creative House is a Creative Network of studios to help with production, and supporting everything will be its Core Services. You can see the basic breakdown of it all in the image below, from a press release.

Not included in the basic breakdown above are some of the key internal changes that Ubisoft is undergoing that it believes are necessary for the restructure to work. It's already started one of those changes, which is simply more layoffs.

"As part of this effort to streamline operations and adapt to evolving market conditions, the Group has already taken decisive actions to adjust its studio footprint," the press release reads. "This includes the closure of the Halifax mobile studio earlier this month and the Stockholm studio, as well as restructurings at Abu Dhabi, RedLynx, and Massive."

Unfortunately, these layoffs that we've already seen, including the closure of the Leamington studio, which isn't mentioned here but does fall within the restructure timeline previously put out by Ubisoft, are not the end. The third and "final phase" of the restructure is still to come, with more set to be announced on February 12, 2026. That said, the third phase of this restructure is "expected to be fully achieved by March 2026," so there could even be more layoffs announced after the February date. The company is looking to these cuts to drive €200 million in savings.

Along with more organizational cuts, another key part of how it'll execute this new structure is a return-to-office mandate. Remote work is being killed off as an option across the company, and instead, employees will have a limited number of days allocated to them to work from home each year, basically equating work-from-home days to vacation or sick days for employees.

"To support the effective implementation and operation of this new model, the Group also intends to return to five days per week on site for all teams, complemented by an annual allowance of working-from-home days. This evolution is intended to strengthen collaboration, including constant knowledge sharing, and the collective dynamic across teams. In-person collaboration is a key enabler of collective efficiency, creativity, and success in a persistently more selective AAA market."

After the world spent the better part of two years locked in their homes and finding ways to make their jobs and lives work without leaving their dwellings, it's difficult to read claims that in-person collaboration and work are "key" to any process. Sure, being in the same room with others can often be the best way for a team to work, but after we had a slew of stellar titles released in recent years, several of which were made by entirely remote teams, we know that developers don't need to move across the world or commute for hours a day to make a good game.

If these mandates accelerate anything, it's company turnover, as many employees are unable to move to new locations if they suddenly need to be in the office five days a week. It's easier to see them as disguised or soft layoffs, instead of changes meant to better employee collaboration.

"We really want to strengthen onsite collaboration, the collective dynamic across teams," added Ubisoft's senior vice president of studio operations, Marie Sophie de Waubert, in an interview with GamesIndustry.Biz. "We know that in-person collaboration and interactions are key enablers of efficiency, creativity, and collective success in this persistently selective market. It's one enabler among others, but it's really one we believe in."

When pressed by GI.Biz about how this mandate will impact staff turnover, de Waubert said, "the one and only objective is to enhance collective efficiency, to drive the dynamics, the creativity, the sense of belonging." De Waubert also adds, "We will, of course, discuss in due time with the different countries the modus operandi, and the flexibility linked to that evolution of our model. But the objective is really linked to the quality of our games and the quality of our creativity. And it's one enabler among others for the Creative Houses to reconnect with success and team engagement."

Speaking of things not needed to make a good game, one of the final ways in which Ubisoft will try to execute its new structure comes from its new Core Services branch, which the company describes as "the backbone of Ubisoft's ecosystem." The teams under the Core Services branch will "focus on delivering scalable technology, production capabilities and operational excellence across the Group."

Among their responsibilities will be production services, i.e quality assurance, localization, playtests and game analytics. Also under the Core Services umbrella is the company's technological infrastructure, including its game engines, online services, IT infrastructure, and most notably, Generative AI.

In fact, the press release specifies "player-facing Generative AI," though it's short on what exactly that means. It could result in nothing, as GenAI is still far from establishing a place in game development, even as major publishers like Ubisoft continue to push for it.

All of these changes, including the new structure, are due to be implemented as of April 2026, which means we'll know more about how these changes go as early as the end of this year, as we continue to monitor and cover Ubisoft as it goes through this massive shift.

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