Ubisoft lays off 51 Barcelona staff days after shipping a critically acclaimed remake

Ubisoft has laid off 51 employees at its Barcelona studio — 28% of the workforce there — just days after the team shipped Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced to strong reviews. The remake landed an 84 on Metacritic, beating Assassin's Creed Shadows (81). It didn't matter. The cuts were reportedly decided long before launch, and workers say neither review scores nor sales figures could have changed the outcome.

The cut

Insider Tom Henderson broke the news on release day. Most of those let go had worked directly on Black Flag Resynced, a project that spanned 15 Ubisoft studios. Staff say they first suspected trouble last summer, when Ubisoft Barcelona wasn't assigned a next project — standard practice at the company. One anonymous employee told Insider Gaming the layoffs reflect something deeper:

> "These cuts are part of broader problems at the company. It's not an isolated incident — it's a pattern: constant disrespect for workers, loss of valuable talent, forced layoffs, suppression of employee rights, and an increasingly authoritarian management culture where people have almost no say in decisions that affect their jobs."

Barcelona is expected to stay open but will be refocused exclusively on the Rainbow Six franchise, ending its work on Assassin's Creed and other titles.

The pattern

This isn't an isolated restructuring. Ubisoft recently shuttered its Winnipeg and Belgrade subsidiaries, bringing total job losses across the company to roughly 380 in Q2 2026 alone. The publisher has shed around 1,700 employees since 2022 — even as it posted record net bookings — and is now targeting an additional €200 million in cost reductions. Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six have been ring-fenced inside a separate subsidiary called Vantage Studios, backed by Tencent. Support teams like Barcelona absorb the cuts while the flagship IPs are protected.

Workers at Ubisoft Barcelona launched a strike on June 30, running through July 16, organized by the CGT union. Their demands include a five-year ban on collective layoffs and protection for affected roles — though the outcome of those negotiations remains unclear. The Game Developer report on the strike details the union's full list of conditions.

The Barcelona situation puts a sharp point on a wider industry tension: studios can deliver a quality product and still face the axe if they're classified as support rather than core to a publisher's IP strategy.