Ubisoft has staff for ’70 Warhorse-sized studios’ after cuts, says Kingdom Come director—’That could be 10 KCD2-sized games… released every year’

Ubisoft has been having a bad time of late. At the beginning of this year, it announced an enormous “restructuring” effort featuring cancellations, layoffs and, yes, generative AI, and all that following some rather dire preceding years. Via “voluntary” reductions and less-voluntary layoffs, Ubisoft has reduced its total number of staff by around 1,200 people over the past year, leaving it with an overall headcount of around 16,600.

Which is, of course, still a lot of people, as noted by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2 director Daniel Vávra in comments on X. Vávra, who is currently working on a Kingdom Come film and who has been replaced as creative director on Warhorse’s upcoming videogame projects by Prokop Jirsa and Viktor Bocan, wrote that “Ubisoft has 16,600 employees after layoffs. Ooops.

“That’s about 70 Warhorse-sized studios. That could be 10 KCD2 sized games, each developed for seven years, released every year!” Vávra—who mentioned owning Ubisoft stock in March—jokingly asked readers if he should “buy the current dip?”

Vávra is habitually pugnacious, and I doubt anyone reading this needs reminding of the controversy he courted by aligning himself with the far-right Gamergate movement, nor of the polar-opposite controversy he ignited among his erstwhile allies in that movement by writing a (genuinely excellent) gay relationship and a prominent black Muslim character into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It’s not uncommon for him to make fun of studios that seem to be doing worse than Warhorse at producing well-liked videogames despite having greater resources, as when he compared player counts between KCD1 and the then-recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

So it’s some classic Vávra posting, but it’s hard to disagree that Ubisoft has been catastrophically mismanaging its vast resources for a long time now. Is it completely fair to compare Ubi with Warhorse? Not quite. Ubisoft is an enormous, multinational corporation with offices across Europe, North America, and Asia, while Warhorse currently only maintains studios in Czechia.

Indeed, when I spoke to both Warhorse co-founder Martin Klima and Prokop Jirsa, both mentioned that operating in Czechia was far cheaper than working in other parts of the world. It’s also, simply, less of a logistical challenge to coordinate work across studios in one country than to coordinate the great shambling behemoth of Ubisoft across continents.

But even with those caveats, Ubisoft has not been run well lately, whether you’re talking about its NFT gambit, myriad layoffs, the rolling circus that was the development of Skull & Bones, or whatever the hell is going on with Beyond Good and Evil 2: the company has not seemed like it has any clue as to what it’s doing for a while. Vávra’s jabs might not be wholly fair but I can’t say Ubi’s leaders haven’t earned them.

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