Ubisoft has reorganized its North American studios round a single core location: Montreal, Canada.
By September 2024, the French developer goals to make the town its central manufacturing hub for North America. Together with the titular Montreal studio chargeable for the Murderer’s Creed and Far Cry video games, it has subsidiaries in North Carolina, San Francisco, Halifax, Quebec, and Toronto.
Prior to now, these studios would function largely of their very own volition: Pink Storm created Tom Clancy video games, the San Francisco studio dealt with South Park, and many others. A unified manufacturing location could have tangible results on the studios’ autonomy, and the video games every of them make going ahead.
Overseeing all of the North American studios might be Christophe Derennes, who presently manages the Montreal workplace. He first joined Ubisoft in 1990, and solely not too long ago turned its studio supervisor in mid-2020.
The brand new location will “symbolize one of many largest online game manufacturing workforce on the planet,” stated Ubisoft. “This new hub reinforces the sturdy ties and current alignment between the assorted North American studios, [and] strengthen the alternatives with the technological and analysis and improvement groups within the area.”
Derennes remarked that the shift will “enable our groups to help each other, be taught from one another, and above all, encourage one another to create the most effective video games for our gamers. We will benefit from every studio’s strengths, and distinctive capacities and experience.”
Over the past a number of months, Ubisoft has made shifts to its operations construction. In the course of the summer time, it promoted veteran workers to supervise totally different departments of key franchises resembling Far Cry and The Division.
On the identical time, it additionally turned embroiled in Microsoft’s not too long ago profitable acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Underneath a struck deal to appease regulators, Ubisoft holds the streaming rights for present and future Activision Blizzard franchise releases (resembling Name of Responsibility) for the subsequent 15 years.
Ubisoft Montreal particularly is claimed to be in some type of disarray following its partial return-to-office rule. The mandate was revealed in mid-September, and lots of on the employees believed it flew within the face of the studio’s earlier guarantees associated to its distant work coverage established throughout the early days of the pandemic.