Five years. Not one game. That is the blunt ledger of Tencent's TiMi Montreal studio, which the Chinese technology giant has quietly shuttered, according to reporting by Game File. The closure, which appears to have taken effect around 20 February, erases a studio that was supposed to be a flagship of Tencent's ambition in Western triple-A game development.
The confirmation came not from Tencent, which has not publicly commented, but from a since-deleted LinkedIn post by a studio programmer. Game File reported that its sources had been warning for weeks that a shutdown was imminent. The programmer wrote that staff had been aware the end was coming "for some time," adding they were "genuinely heartbroken that the public will never get to experience what this team was capable of producing." A senior designer echoed that sentiment, describing the team as exceptional not just in technical skill but in the kind of collegial spirit that is hard to manufacture and easy to lose.
TiMi Montreal was announced in July 2021 with a specific mandate: build an original "AAA open world, service-focused video game for players to explore across multiple platforms," with PC and consoles the primary targets. It was, by any measure, an audacious brief. Montreal's gaming ecosystem, shaped for decades by the sprawling presence of Ubisoft, was seen as the ideal place to recruit the kind of talent capable of delivering on that promise.
Among those recruits was Ashraf Ismail, the former creative director on Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Origins, and Black Flag. Ismail had been fired by Ubisoft in August 2020 following an investigation by an external firm into misconduct allegations. He had been publicly accused of pursuing extramarital relationships with women while misrepresenting his marital status. Ubisoft's company-wide message at the time stated that following the investigation, "Ashraf's employment with Ubisoft had to be terminated," though the publisher declined to provide further details given the confidential nature of the process. Ismail joined TiMi Montreal in 2021 and held the role of creative director there, according to his LinkedIn profile, which had not yet been updated to reflect the studio's closure as of initial reporting.
Here's the thing: TiMi Studio Group is far from a minor player. The Tencent-backed group, headquartered in Shenzhen, is responsible for Call of Duty: Mobile, Pokémon Unite, and Honor of Kings, and employs between 5,000 and 10,000 people across its global operations. The Montreal branch was always a relatively small outpost within that structure, but it carried symbolic weight as the group's clearest statement of intent in the Western AAA space. That intent has now been formally abandoned.
The closure is not an isolated incident. TiMi's Los Angeles-based studio, Team Kaiju, which had recruited former leads from both Halo and Battlefield, was shut down by Tencent back in 2023. Tencent's rival NetEase has made similar headlines for cutting investment in Western studio ventures it had built up during the pandemic-era gaming boom. The pattern is clear: a wave of Chinese capital that washed into North American and European game development around 2020 and 2021 is now rapidly receding.
The commercial logic behind that retreat is straightforward enough. Western AAA development is extraordinarily expensive, with long development cycles, high labour costs, and no guarantee of a return. TiMi Montreal never publicly disclosed what it was actually building, which itself raises questions about how far into production the project had progressed. Five years of salaries, infrastructure, and creative overhead, with nothing to show and nothing to ship, represents a significant write-off for even a conglomerate of Tencent's scale.
Those sympathetic to the studio's workforce, and there are good reasons to be, will point out that the people who lost their jobs had little control over the commercial and strategic decisions made in Shenzhen. Talented developers who dedicated years to a project they believed in have been left without a product to show for it, in a job market that has contracted sharply across the industry. Game File noted that TiMi Group's current job vacancies are concentrated entirely in China, which offers little comfort to those now out of work in Montreal.
Tencent's broader investment posture in Western gaming is more selective than its studio-building phase suggested. The company holds a 26.32 per cent economic stake in Ubisoft's newly formed subsidiary Vantage Studios, which will oversee franchises including Assassin's Creed and Far Cry. It has also backed Lighthouse Games, a UK studio led by Playground Games founder Gavin Raeburn. These are targeted bets on existing intellectual property and proven talent, not blank-cheque experiments in original franchise creation.
That shift in strategy reflects something broader about where the economics of the games industry have landed. The pandemic-era assumption that rising player numbers and swelling revenues would sustain endless expansion has collided with the reality of post-boom contraction. Building original AAA franchises from scratch, in unfamiliar markets, without the safety net of an established IP, was always a high-risk proposition. TiMi Montreal's closure is a case study in exactly that risk, and the human cost of getting it wrong.
Whether Tencent's pull-back from direct Western studio ownership is permanent or merely a pause remains an open question. The company still has deep pockets and a demonstrable appetite for influence in global gaming. For now, though, the lights are off in Montreal, and a studio's worth of ambition has gone dark without a single frame of its work ever reaching a screen.