Tencent has shuttered its TiMi Studio in Montreal.
The developer was originally founded in July 2021 to produce “AAA open-world multi-platform games,” but ultimately, it never even got to unveil a project before its closure. As Game File reports, Tencent quietly axed the studio, with the news only being made official via former employees posting about their job losses on LinkedIn.
It’s unclear exactly why TiMi Montreal was shut down, especially as Tencent didn’t respond to Game File. The publication had also been investigating reports about the planned closure for weeks, but still hadn’t heard a concrete decision.
What’s most likely is that this is just part of Tencent’s larger push over the past year to minimize its international presence. Amid the COVID surge in demand for games, Tencent was one of many companies that ramped up investment, and part of that included expansion in areas like Montreal.
However, it’s been taking steps to divest from most of these ventures in recent months, a move that’s resulted in closures of studios like TiMi Montreal and Worlds Untold, the latter of which was a Vancouver-based team led by Mass Effect veteran Mac Walters. Even still, the larger TiMi Studio Group remains one of the most successful gaming companies in the world thanks to smash hit mobile games like Honor of Kings, Arena of Valor, Call of Duty: Mobile and Delta Force.
Meanwhile, the only thing we really know about TiMi Montreal is that it was being led by former Ubisoft Montreal developer Ashraf Ismail, who spearheaded Assassin’s Creed Origins and Valhalla. Ismail was fired from Ubisoft after allegations of abuse of power amid a wider investigation into toxic work culture and sexual misconduct within the company.
Tencent isn’t the only Chinese gaming company to recently shutter a studio in Canada. In November, NetEase closed Toronto- and Montreal-based Bad Brain, which had been working on a mysterious “AAA action-adventure, open-world paranormal adventure era set in the late ’80s.”
That said, other Asian video game giants have active studios in Canada. miHoYo, the Chinese maker of popular games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, has a Montreal office, as does Krafton, the South Korean conglomerate behind PUBG and the just-announced Project Windless.
Image credit: Tencent
Source: Game File
