"The Settlers" studio in Düsseldorf lays off 65 employees

The Blue Byte development studio in Düsseldorf is one of the largest and most renowned German game studios. With the "The Settlers" series, one of Germany's best-known game exports comes from this studio. Blue Byte has been part of Ubisoft since 2001. The studio is now laying off 65 employees. Ubisoft announced the measure to the magazine VGC (Video Games Chronicle) as part of further cutbacks. Other European Ubisoft locations are also affected.

The long-awaited "Anno 117: Pax Romana" is also being developed under the Blue Byte umbrella. However, work on the city-building and economic simulation expected for 2025 will not be affected by the wave of redundancies.

Blue Byte is Ubisoft's mainstay in Germany

Blue Byte was founded in 1988. The studio hit the big time with "The Settlers" in 1993. Further commercially successful "Settlers" instalments followed, although "The Settlers: New Alliances", which was released two years ago, was not well received by fans and critics alike.

After being incorporated into the Ubisoft Group, Blue Byte operates as the umbrella organisation for Ubisoft's activities in Germany. Three studios belong to it: The headquarters, Ubisoft Düsseldorf, employed 400 people in August 2024. The team works on various browser games and serves as co-developer on games such as "Rainbow Six Siege" and "Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora".

Ubisoft Mainz is known for the "Anno" series and is now working on the next instalment, "Anno 117: Pax Romana". As of August 2024, 175 people were employed here. Ubisoft Berlin is the youngest of the three studios. It was founded in 2018, employed 120 employees in August 2024 and primarily takes on support tasks for larger AAA titles.

Only Ubisoft Düsseldorf is affected by the redundancies in Germany. 65 employees have to go.

More redundancies at Ubisoft in Europe

In total, Ubisoft is laying off 185 employees in four European studios. The Leamington studio in England has been hit particularly hard and will be closed completely. It was called FreeStyleGames before it was taken over by Ubisoft. Most recently, it mainly supported other studios in the development of major game titles, including "Assassin's Creed" and "The Division". Ubisoft Reflections in the north of England and Ubisoft Stockholm will also lose employees.

According to Ubisoft, the redundancies are "part of our efforts to prioritise projects and reduce costs" in order to stabilise the financial difficulties the company finds itself in. It is a restructuring of the aforementioned studios, as a result of which 185 jobs will be lost. At the beginning of January, there were rumours that Ubisoft was about to be sold.