Xbox Weighs Sale of Arkane Studios as Ubisoft Joins Bidders for Blade Developer
Xbox is weighing acquisition offers for Arkane Studios from several companies, including Ubisoft, Bloomberg reported on November 3, 2026. Ubisoft is one of at least three bidders. The other two are unnamed gaming companies. Xbox has also considered selling the studio to its own management.
Arkane Lyon, the French developer behind Dishonored and Deathloop, is building a video game adaptation of Marvel's Blade. Arkane revealed the project with a cinematic trailer in 2023. Bloomberg reports that a deal would likely allow Arkane to finish its work on the game.
An Xbox representative told Bloomberg that the company is exploring options for Arkane ahead of a December deadline. As of the report, Microsoft had not accepted any bid to buy Arkane Lyon, according to IGN, which also named Ubisoft among the suitors. Engadget attributes its own account of the bids to Bloomberg.
The sale process follows earlier reporting from June. At that time, reports said Xbox had considered shutting down Arkane, a move that would have put Marvel's Blade in danger. The possible closure was linked to a planned wave of cost cuts and job losses across Xbox gaming, according to PureXBox. Xbox's current options, as its representative described them, center on a sale rather than closure.
For developers, the practical question is continuity. A studio with one large project in production depends on its owner's decisions about budgets, headcount, and release windows. A change of ownership can preserve a project, reshape it, or end it, and the terms of any deal determine which outcome applies. None of the reported bids has been accepted.
The broader context here is a platform holder reassessing a studio it owns while managing cost pressure across its gaming organization. Sales of first-party studios are not unusual in the industry, but a bidder list that includes a publisher of Ubisoft's profile, alongside a management buyout option, puts the structure of the deal at the center of the story.
In my view, the most useful date to watch is the December deadline. If a transaction closes with the Arkane Lyon team intact and Blade still in production, the studio behind Dishonored and Deathloop would keep building a Marvel game it had already started. That is the optimistic reading, and it depends on terms that have not been made public.
