Why Ubisoft Is Keeping Red Storm Entertainment Open—But Shutting Down Its Game Development

Ubisoft announced in 2024 that it would stop making games at Red Storm Entertainment and lay off 105 employees at the studio. Red Storm, a North Carolina-based studio known for building Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games, will stay open — but it will no longer develop new games, according to GamesIndustry.biz.

This puts Red Storm in an odd position. The studio still exists on the payroll, with some staff remaining, but it is no longer creating games. Ubisoft has not publicly explained what those remaining employees will actually do.

Red Storm's History

Red Storm Entertainment was founded in 1996 by author Tom Clancy and others, then acquired by Ubisoft in 2000. For over 20 years, it was the main studio behind Ubisoft's most popular tactical shooter games — games where players use cover, coordinate with teammates, and face off against intelligent enemies. The studio built up deep knowledge of how to design these systems. That expertise is not easy to transfer if the studio is no longer making games.

The 105 layoffs are part of a much larger reduction at Ubisoft. Between September 2022 and March 2024, the company laid off more than 1,700 workers total, according to Game Developer. Red Storm's cuts are part of that bigger number.

The Surprising Financial Story

What makes this announcement worth paying attention to is a seeming contradiction. While Ubisoft was cutting 1,700 jobs, its revenue actually grew. Between fiscal 2023 and 2024, Ubisoft's net bookings — the money the company brought in — rose by 33.5 percent, per Game Developer. This is not a struggling company. It is a company deliberately shrinking its payroll to make more profit from fewer, bigger bets.

This pattern shows up across the entire games industry right now. After 2020–2022, when companies hired lots of people during a pandemic boom, they have been cutting back. Ubisoft, which owns studios all over the world — Montréal, Paris, Kyoto, Toronto, and many smaller locations — had more places to cut than most.

There is a structural question worth considering here. Instead of fully shutting down Red Storm, Ubisoft is keeping it open but killing its development work. That is an unusual middle ground. The company avoids the bad press of closing a studio with a storied name, while it saves money by not running a production pipeline. But Ubisoft has not explained whether keeping the studio around will actually create value, or whether it is just a slower version of shutting it down. That ambiguity suggests the company itself may not have fully decided.

A Move the Industry Has Tried Before

This tactic is not new. In the mid-to-late 2000s, after major publishers like Vivendi, THQ, and Midway merged and consolidated, many studios found themselves in the same situation: kept open on paper but stripped of development work, reduced to support roles, then quietly closed a few years later. The reasoning was the same then — preserve options, avoid the optics of a hard closure. What actually happened was that talented staff left quickly once new games stopped being made, and the studio name alone did not justify the cost to keep it around.

Whether Ubisoft follows the same path at Red Storm remains unclear, but the structural pattern is recognizable from the 2000s playbook.

What Happens to the Games

The Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon franchises will not disappear. Ubisoft still runs Rainbow Six Siege out of its Montréal studio, and it remains one of the company's most profitable live-service games — the kind that players keep paying money into over months or years. Ending Red Storm's development work does not kill that franchise; it just consolidates it further under Montréal's control.

Ghost Recon's future is less certain. The series has had ups and downs in recent years, and no new Ghost Recon game has been officially announced. Whether closing Red Storm's development affects Ghost Recon's prospects is unclear.

The Human Side

The 105 people being laid off at Red Storm are game developers: designers, programmers, artists, producers, and quality assurance specialists. North Carolina's Research Triangle area has a small but real games industry presence — not nearly as many studios as Los Angeles, Seattle, or Montréal — so most of these workers will either need to relocate or move into a different industry.

This layoff is also happening at a difficult time for the industry. Activision Blizzard, EA, Sony, Microsoft Gaming, and many independent studios have all cut jobs over the past few years. That means there are fewer open positions at the exact moment more experienced developers are looking for work.

The broader context here involves something often overlooked in stories about net bookings and corporate restructuring. Each of these 105 people is a skilled professional with years of experience in a demanding craft — often a decade or more — trying to navigate a downturn that they did not cause and cannot control.

Ubisoft's New Direction

By the end of 2024, Ubisoft operates with a leaner team and a portfolio narrowed down to live-service games and a small number of major releases. The 33.5 percent revenue increase shows this strategy is working financially, at least in the short run. The question for the longer term is whether cutting back on creative people and spreading fewer teams across fewer projects will still produce the variety of games that built Ubisoft's reputation in the first place. The numbers so far do not answer that question.

Red Storm's transition is both a small detail in Ubisoft's multi-year restructuring and a concrete snapshot of what industry consolidation looks like on the ground: not always a door slamming shut, but sometimes just a lock turning.