Ubisoft Is Closing Another Studio, Possibly Ending a Fan-Favorite 25-Year Franchise

Could This Be the End of Experiments?

RedLynx Skull and Bones Trials Ubisoft Ubisoft Singapore

In a statement reported by GI.biz, Ubisoft has announced its "proposal" to close Finnish studio Ubisoft RedLynx, longtime creator of the Trials series of extreme motorcycle stunt games. This is the latest move in 2026 by the publisher, which is part of an ongoing "restructuring" of its global network of development teams into so-called creative houses. The latest job loss will come to Ubisoft Singapore, the team responsible for 2024's $200 million "quadruple A" disaster Skull and Bones, which saw 70 staffers lose their roles.

For Ubisoft, closing RedLynx isn't as simple as some of the other studios that have gone out of business in the past year. Finland has special laws called "change negotiations" or "collaborative negotiations" that legally require employers to consult with employees before layoffs and major company changes. Clearly, the closing of the 25-year-old studio, which was bought by Ubisoft in 2011, falls very much under those categories, and the law specifically requires such actions to be "foreseeable," meaning an employer must enter into negotiations before deciding on the outcome. Hence Ubisoft's phrase to say that this closure is a "proposal" at this point.

RedLynx was already hit hard in 2025 when more than half of Ubisoft's workforce was laid off and the remaining team announced. It will focus solely on making mobile games.

According to VGC, Ubisoft's motivation for shutting down RedLynx and laying off 52 employees is that it "is not currently working on a new project, and because resizing alone is not sustainable." In the seven years since the last edition of Trials, RedLynx helped Massive port The Division 2 to Google's Stadia streaming service for 2020, and in 2023 released a short-lived free-to-play match-3 mobile game called Gwen's Getaway, which was pulled after a year before the release.

It seems unlikely that RedLynx isn't actually working on anything, especially since Ubisoft already claimed two unannounced projects were in development a year ago, and because what else has the 52-person staff been up to? It also seems hard for the studio not to work on a new mobile version of Trials, as the 2D obstacle course format is ideal for touchscreens and now that the technology has advanced enough to avoid a repeat of 2014's disappointing Trials Frontier on iOS and Android.

It also leaves the question of where to put the tests. Seven years without a new game is sad enough, but does the (planned) closure of RedLynx mean the franchise is dead for good? We've reached out to Ubisoft for more details.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft Singapore is "downsizing". GI.biz reports a statement from Ubisoft announcing, "At Ubisoft Singapore, 70 positions have been affected to align the studio with future production needs." The Singapore studio was originally created as one of Ubisoft's international support teams, a group that worked on massive AAA games helmed by other studios, but ended up taking on the Sisyphean task of making Skull and Bones, an 11-year toil to develop Assassin's Creed, which never turned into a negative naval battle review.

Since then, the studio has taken the lead on the much more successful Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, which can probably be hoped for some sort of respite, especially after selling over 3.5 million copies in its first two weeks. Unfortunately, even that hasn't proven to be enough, probably given Ubisoft's years of incompetence.

All this piecemeal "restructuring" carried out so brutally over so long certainly doesn't make a difference when it comes to investors' faith in Ubisoft. Things went very wrong in 2021, when the company's €84 share price began to fall, falling to €3.84 in March 2026, and up around €5 since then. This represents a 95% fall from its 2018 peak of €100 per share and shows no signs of recovery.

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