Tencent-backed TiMi Montreal is shutting down less than five years after opening and without ever shipping a game. It appears to be the latest casualty of Chinese publishers pulling back on investment in North American studios.
As first reported by Game File, news of the closure began to trickle out on LinkedIn late last week. “I am genuinely heartbroken that the public will never get to experience what this team was capable of producing,” one laid-off programmer wrote. “TiMi Montreal was made up of really talented people and working with them was a privilege, the level of skill and dedication on this team was something special.”
The studio was founded back in 2021 and was pitched as working on “AAA open world multi-platform games.” It joined TiMi Los Angeles and TiMi Seattle as the third office of TiMi Studio Group in North America. The company behind mobile hits like Honor of Kings and Arena of Valor was trying to branch out into bigger-budget blockbusters.
A studio in Montreal seemed to outsiders like the perfect way to scoop up talent from open-world adventure factory Ubisoft. That included Assassin’s Creed Valhalla creative director Ashraf Ismail, who joined TiMi in 2022 after being fired from Ubisoft following allegations around some of his personal romantic relationships.
But TiMi Montreal never announced a game it was making, or disclosed any co-development support it was providing on any recently shipped projects. TiMi’s L.A.-based studio Team Kaiju, which attracted former leads from Halo and Battlefield, ended up shutting down back in 2023. The retreat follows concerns about pricey development costs in the U.S. and competitors like NetEase cutting investment in a bunch of recent studio startups over the past couple of years.