The creator of *Rainbow Six* loses power! Ubisoft’s move is too ruthless.

They made a very pragmatic trade-off here: cutting mid-tier and core R&D capabilities while continuing to pile resources onto top-tier IPs. According to reports from overseas media outlets such as VGC and GamesIndustry.biz, Ubisoft’s Red Storm Entertainment will end independent game development, with 105 layoffs involved, and will retain only technical support functions in the future. This is not an ordinary personnel adjustment, but a complete revocation of the studio’s authority.

If judged solely by pedigree, Red Storm is not a studio that can be brushed aside lightly. It created the first Rainbow Six in 1998, was acquired by Ubisoft in 2000, and subsequently spent years contributing to Tom Clancy-related projects. But from a design perspective, after 2012’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, the studio had already gradually moved away from the center of Ubisoft’s mainstream product pipeline. In recent years, it had repeatedly shifted to VR content, which shows that its position in Ubisoft’s internal resource hierarchy had long been marginalized.

From a technical standpoint, a so-called “support studio” does not mean it has no value. Major AAA projects increasingly resemble modular collaborative engineering: toolchains, online functionality, level implementation, porting, and platform adaptation all require experienced teams to hold things together. But that is also where the problem lies: once a team can no longer lead projects, its most essential creative capabilities become very difficult to continue accumulating. Over time, it only turns into a replaceable labor node. That line in the original report — “the studio will officially cease all independent game development work” — essentially means stepping back from being a content creator to becoming part of the industrial support layer.

From a business logic perspective, this move fits Ubisoft’s current path of contraction very well. VR has never delivered sufficiently large content returns over the past few years, and it is hardly surprising that Red Storm’s situation did not improve despite betting its last three projects on VR. For a publicly listed company, protecting the top brands that can generate sustained revenue is more “professional” than continuing to give veteran teams room to experiment; but from the perspective of the creative ecosystem, this kind of handling also easily leaves the mark of assembly-line-style management — the short-term financial statements look better, while long-term original creative capacity grows thinner.

Player communities have actually felt something similar over the past two years: people remember the brand, but do they still ask “who made it”? When a name like Rainbow Six increasingly resembles a platform-style asset rather than the work of a specific team, the first thing to disappear in the industry is often the studio’s own methodology. Red Storm has a 28-year history, and now it has been reduced to support work only; this really does feel like the closing chapter of an era.

For players, this news will not directly affect what to play today; but for industry observers, the signal it sends is very clear: major publishers will become more conservative in the future, and there will be fewer and fewer teams able to lead new IPs and mid-sized projects. What is admirable is Ubisoft’s decisiveness in cost control; what is regrettable is that the Red Storm which once defined the character of tactical shooters no longer has the authority to open a new front.