Ubisoft Proposes Closing Trials Studio RedLynx With 52 Jobs at Risk and Cuts 70 at Skull and Bones Dev

By CriticalPixel · 2026-10-14

Ubisoft has proposed closing RedLynx, the Finnish studio that built the Trials series, and up to 52 jobs are at risk if the plan goes through. On the same day it told staff that 70 positions are impacted at Ubisoft Singapore, the team that led development of Skull and Bones. That is 122 people in one announcement, and neither studio has a game in production that anyone outside Ubisoft has heard of. If you were waiting for the final round of cost cutting to feel final, this is not the day it started.

Official Trials Rising screenshot showing a rider mid-jump over a stadium track

What Ubisoft actually said

GamesIndustry.biz published the company statement, and the wording is careful. "Today, we informed our teams of a proposal to close RedLynx in Finland, subject to the local change negotiation process, which would affect up to 52 positions," Ubisoft said. The word proposal matters here, because Finnish labour rules mean the company has to negotiate with employees before anything is final. For Singapore the language is softer and somehow worse: 70 positions "have been impacted to align the studio with upcoming production needs." That works out to roughly a fifth of the studio's headcount, and "upcoming production needs" is a polite way of saying there is less to build.

RedLynx was already living on borrowed time

Ubisoft bought RedLynx in 2011 off the back of Trials HD and Trials 2, and the studio is still the developer listed on the Trials Rising Steam page. Last October Ubisoft proposed cutting up to 60 jobs and told the studio to specialise in small screens, with two unannounced mobile games in the works. GamesIndustry.biz understands RedLynx now has no current project and no standalone games that could sustain it, so the mobile pivot ended up as a countdown. The one original title we saw from it was Gwen's Getaway, a puzzle and decorate game that soft launched in 2023. Beyond that the studio was a support team, and it was one of the teams that touched Rainbow Six Mobile, a game Ubisoft already said it will close on January 15.

Official Trials Rising screenshot of a motorbike rider tackling an obstacle course

The Rainbow Six Mobile numbers say a lot about the strategy. Per Mobilegamer.biz, eleven Ubisoft studios contributed to that game, and AppMagic estimates it earned about $5.3 million in lifetime in-app purchases from 13.1 million downloads. Spread that across eleven teams and you get a project that was never going to keep a Trials studio alive. Rock Paper Shotgun adds that in recent years RedLynx appears to have worked mostly as support for Massive, which is how a studio famous for faceplanting a dirt bike ends up helping on The Division 2 and Star Wars Outlaws.

Singapore, Skull and Bones and a very long year

Ubisoft Singapore started in 2008 as a support studio and built the naval combat sections of the Assassin's Creed games, which led to Skull and Bones, a project with a notoriously bruising development that slipped repeatedly before shipping in 2024. The same studio also led Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, which is back in the news this week over a datamined epilogue scene. So the studio did not fail to deliver, it delivered a pirate game people love to mock and a remake of a fan favorite. Both RedLynx and Singapore sat inside Ubisoft's Creative Network, the central unit that backs other teams, which tells you where the cuts land: the support layer is what gets trimmed when the money tightens.

This is not a one-off. Ubisoft has closed studios in Stockholm, Halifax, Winnipeg and Belgrade this year, cancelled six games, and reorganised everything into Creative Houses. Rock Paper Shotgun also points to strikes at the Milan studio over work from home policies, so morale is not a strong point at the moment.

How people are reacting

Reaction is limited so far, since the news only broke this morning. Under IGN's post on X the replies are a mix of gallows humor and shrugs. One fan wrote that they loved the Trials series and that it sucks to see it shut down, and another pointed out that Ubisoft coined the AAAA label for Skull and Bones and is now the one sinking. That is a handful of replies, not a consensus, so treat it as the mood of the first hour.

Official Trials Rising screenshot of a track with ramps and balancing platforms

The CriticalPixel take

Trials was never a blockbuster, but it was one of the cleanest ideas in racing: a physics toy where one wrong lean on a ramp costs you a run and you immediately want another. Ubisoft owned that for fifteen years and spent the last stretch of it pushing the studio toward mobile and support work, then acts surprised when there is nothing left to justify the team. Closing a studio with no project is the easy call on a spreadsheet. It also means the person who would have pitched the next Trials is now in a Finnish change negotiation. If Ubisoft ever wants to sell nostalgia for Trials, there will be a logo and no team behind it.

For now nothing is final. The RedLynx closure is a proposal, the Singapore numbers are described as impacted positions rather than confirmed layoffs, and Ubisoft has not named a date. We will update this as the Finnish consultation and any follow-up statement land, but with a Creative Houses restructure still grinding through its final stage, nobody should bet on a reprieve.