Ubisoft has been undergoing some restructuring, as in actual changes to its massive structure spread across multiple studios and teams across the globe. The game publisher and development company earlier this year have been reorganised into Creative Houses, where multiple studios across the world are assigned IPs.
At the time, only one of the Creative Houses has a bespoke name, Vantage Studios, the team that overseeing development of the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Rainbow Six series. This is the specific Ubisoft development team that has been receiving outside investment from Tencent.
Today, Creative House 2 gets a rebrand as it is now labelled as Massive Entertainment.
Massive, the Swedish development team behind The Division series and more recently Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws, will now take over Creative House 2.
Massive was already part of Creative House 2, which oversees Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and The Division—all three military-based franchises that officially includes the name of the late novelist Tom Clancy.
No new studios were assigned— Ubisoft Montréal, Paris and Toronto were all affiliated under Creative House 2 previously.
What the announcement is about is the placement of the Massive brand overseeing this Creative House. The team has been successful with building and maintaining their in-house game engine Snowdrop, has seen great success with The Division series that The Division 2 has now gotten another round of live-service updates. It’s also one of the few studios under Ubisoft that has a brand identity (Massive were acquired in 2008 rather than founded in-house).
The announcement of the rebranding of Creative House 2 also includes the mention of new IP, one of which is March of Giants. This is a free-to-play MOBA initially developed by Amazon’s Montreal Games studio that was later acquired by Ubisoft. Amazon has since pulled out from all video game development and publishing activities, which also saw them dropping the publishing duties for the upcoming open-world racer now known as Clutch.
Ubisoft currently have five Creative Houses plus a Creative Network of various internal support studios across the world. Creative House 3 oversees live-service games including For Honor and The Crew. Creative House 4 houses the more niche but loved IPs including Anno, Prince Of Persia, Rayman and Heroes Of Might And Magic. Creative House 5 is the home of mobile and casual gaming, where franchises like Just Dance and the video game adaptation of various Hasbro franchises resides.