In a statement reported by GI.biz, Ubisoft has announced its “proposal” to close Finnish studio Ubisoft RedLynx, the long-time creators of the fantastic Trials series of motorbike stunt games. This is the latest move in the flailing publisher’s grim 2026, a part of the ongoing “restructuring” of the worldwide network of development teams into so-called creative houses. The latest job losses will also hit Ubisoft Singapore, the team responsible for 2024’s “quadruple A” $200 million-loss disaster, Skull and Bones, with 70 staff losing their roles.
For Ubisoft, closing RedLynx isn’t as simple as some of the other studios it’s killed off over the last year. Finland has specific laws called “change negotiations” or “co-operation negotiations,” where it’s legally required for employers to consult with employees before layoffs and large company changes. Clearly closing the 25-year-old studio, acquired by Ubisoft in 2011, would very much fall under those categories, and the law specifically requires such actions to be “anticipatory,” meaning an employer must enter the negotiations before it’s made a decision over the result. Hence Ubisoft’s wording to say that this closure is a “proposal” at this stage.
RedLynx was already hit hard in 2025 when Ubisoft laid off more than half its workforce, and announced the remaining team would be focused solely on making mobile games.
According to VGC, Ubisoft’s motivation to close down RedLynx, and terminate its 52 staff, is that “it’s not currently working on a new project, and because resizing alone wouldn’t keep it sustainable.” In the seven years since the last Trials release, RedLynx aided Massive on the porting of The Division 2 to Google’s doomed Stadia streaming service for 2020, and in 2023 released a very short-lived free-to-play mobile match-3 game called Gwen’s Getaway, that was taken down after a year before it ever reached a finished version.
It seems vanishingly unlikely that RedLynx really isn’t working on anything, not least because Ubisoft previously claimed a year ago that there were two unannounced projects in development, and because what else have the 52 staff been doing? It also seems hard to believe that the studio wouldn’t be working on a new mobile version of Trials, since the 2D obstacle course format is ideal for touchscreens, and now that the tech has caught up enough to prevent a repeat of 2014’s disappointing iOS and Android release Trials Frontier.
It also leaves the question of where this leaves Trials. Seven years without a new game has been sad enough, but does the (planned) closure of RedLynx mean the franchise is dead for good? We’ve reached out to Ubisoft to ask for more details.
All at sea
Meanwhile Ubisoft Singapore is being “downsized.” GI.biz reports Ubisoft’s statement announcing, “At Ubisoft Singapore, 70 positions have been impacted to align the studio with upcoming production needs.” The Singapore studio was originally created to be one of Ubisoft’s international support teams, a group that would work on its colossal AAA games being led by other studios, but eventually took on the Sisyphean task of creating Skull and Bones, an 11-year toil of elaborating Assassin’s Creed‘s naval battles into a full game, that never came together and released to negative reviews and terrible sales.
Since then the studio took the lead on the far more successful Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, which presumably would have been hoped to be some sort of reprieve, especially after selling more than 3.5 million copies in its first two weeks. Sadly, likely given the incompetence with which Ubisoft has been run for so many years, even this hasn’t proven enough.
All of this piecemeal “restructuring,” being dragged out so cruelly for so long, certainly isn’t making any difference when it comes to investor’s faith in Ubisoft. Things started to go very wrong in 2021 when the company’s €84 share price began to inexorably tumble, crashing to €3.84 in March 2026, and bumbling along at around €5 since. That represents a 95 percent collapse since its 2018 peak at €100 per share, and it’s showing no signs of recovery.