Red Storm Entertainment created Ghost Recon. It created Rainbow Six. It spent nearly three decades building the tactical shooter genre into what it is today. As of this week, its new job is IT support and Snowdrop engine maintenance. That's not a demotion. That's a demolition.
Ubisoft has confirmed it is ending all game development at the North Carolina studio, resulting in 105 layoffs. According to Ubisoft's January restructuring announcement, the company is undergoing a "major organisational, operational and portfolio reset" to respond to a more selective AAA market. Red Storm, it turns out, is one of the casualties of that reset. The studio will technically continue to exist, handling global IT functions and support work on the Snowdrop engine, but every game developer on staff has been made redundant. The name survives. The studio does not.
Founded in 1996, Red Storm was the house that Tom Clancy built. The studio adapted his novels into a string of landmark military games, starting with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and going on to develop the original Ghost Recon and multiple sequels through the 2000s. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier in 2012 was the last major entry the studio led. After Ubisoft acquired Red Storm in 2000, the flagship Tom Clancy IPs gradually migrated to larger studios like Ubisoft Montreal and Massive Entertainment, pushing Red Storm toward VR work. Its final shipped title was Assassin's Creed Nexus VR in 2023, and before that it made Star Trek: Bridge Crew, which was genuinely one of the better VR co-op experiences of its era.
A Studio Hollowed Out Over Years
This didn't happen overnight. Red Storm had been quietly gutted across multiple rounds of cuts before this final one. The Division: Heartland, a free-to-play spin-off that would have been the studio's biggest project in years, was cancelled in May 2024. Forty-five employees were let go across Red Storm and Ubisoft San Francisco in August of that year. Then another 19 left in July 2025. This week's 105 redundancies are the largest single cut, and they complete the process. Tom Henderson confirmed that Red Storm had been contributing support work across roughly ten projects before Ubisoft pulled the plug on game development entirely.
The studio also had a Splinter Cell VR game in development that was cancelled back in 2022, which means Red Storm's last two full game projects were both killed before they shipped. That's a brutal run for any studio, and it makes the final outcome feel less like a sudden decision and more like a slow, managed wind-down that the people working there probably saw coming long before the announcement.
Ubisoft's broader restructuring has been relentless. Ubisoft Halifax and Ubisoft Stockholm have been shuttered. Massive Entertainment, Redlynx, and the Abu Dhabi office have all been restructured with accompanying job losses. The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, which had been in development for years, was cancelled earlier this year. The company has reorganised around five "creative houses", with Tom Clancy properties including Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and The Division sitting under Creative House 2. Red Storm, the studio that built those IPs from scratch, isn't part of any of them.
Credit where it's due: Ubisoft at least kept the lights on rather than closing the studio outright, and engine support work is real, necessary work. But framing a studio that invented Ghost Recon as an IT department is the kind of corporate decision that tells you everything about how Ubisoft values its own history. The people who lost their jobs this week built something that millions of players still remember. That's not nothing, and it deserves to be said plainly.
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