With recent massive layoffs across Microsoft Xbox's development teams, it's easy to overlook that not only this major gaming company is restructuring its studio architecture to increase revenue. For much of 2026, Ubisoft has been undergoing similar adjustments, resulting in large-scale layoffs, the closure of several studios, and a chaotic restructuring that gave rise to temporary business names like "Creative Hub 2." Now, this temporary title will be replaced by the name of one of Ubisoft's more successful teams—Massive Entertainment. This team will oversee many of Ubisoft's IPs, including The Division, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, the MOBA game Giant Slayer recently acquired from Amazon, and several unrevealed projects, likely including new works Massive is developing after Star Wars Outlaws.
Ubisoft has always adopted a global multi-team collaboration model for game development, and this new structure continues this approach: Ubisoft Paris, Montreal, Toronto studios, and Massive Entertainment itself will all fall under the Massive brand. This means the team will be responsible for most Tom Clancy series titles (The Division, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, but excluding Rainbow Six), while also operating Giant Slayer and an unspecified "brand new original IP." The rest of the large publisher's game business is distributed among five other "creative hubs," including Vantage Studio, a joint venture between Ubisoft and Tencent, as well as Creative Hub 3, 4, and 5, whose names are still subject to optimization.
This July, Ubisoft announced that Creative Hub 2 would be led by Christoph Hartmann. Hartmann is a 20-year veteran of Take-Two Interactive, co-founder of 2K Games, and briefly served as Vice President at the troubled Amazon Games division. Last week, Natalie Francis, former Chief Development Officer at Avalanche Studios, also joined the team as Studio Manager for Massive's Malmö studio. Today, this Swedish city seems to have become the core hub of this studio network.
Massive today is a far cry from what it was when it was founded in 1997. It was originally established by a group of alumni in the small Swedish town of Ronneby, and its first work was the critically acclaimed real-time strategy game Ground Control; after being acquired by Vivendi, the team released World in Conflict. In 2008, Activision merged with Vivendi and put Massive up for sale, which Ubisoft promptly acquired. After that, the studio was inevitably integrated into Ubisoft's mass-production system, no longer developing those creative strategy games, but instead assisting in the development of the Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series. In 2016, Massive led the development of The Division, then developed the Avatar IP adaptation Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and later released Star Wars Outlaws, which ultimately received favorable reviews.
During the development of Ground Control in 1997, I visited their original studio, and the contrast between then and now is stark. At that time, I flew from Copenhagen to the Ronneby studio on a small propeller plane, enduring a bumpy hour-long flight where the "meal" was just a can of cookies handed over by the pilot. The local airport was as small as a rural elementary school, and customs was just an employee sitting on a wooden chair in the hallway. Everythinggj was great back then. Massive was born there because of the Ronneby Knowledge School, where most members of the development team had studied. Today, the company headquarters is located in Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city, occupying a significant portion of the local job market.