Ubisoft quietly cancel The Division Heartland

As Ubisoft revealed Assassin's Creed Shadows they also released their earnings report for the financial year 2023-2024. Buried among the chatter of "profitable growth trajectories" and "B2B partnerships" was a brief note about looter shooter The Division Heartland. "Ubisoft has decided to stop development on The Division Heartland," it reads, "and has redeployed resources to bigger opportunities such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six." Ah, so this is the games industry equivalent of being summarily dumped by text.

The Division Heartland is (was) a free-to-play survival shooter set in a small fictional town in middle America. It was announced back in 2021 and was set to tie into the Division's overall storyline while showing the pandemic's fallout from a more rural perspective. In truth we didn't see much of it but from glimpses of the developer's work it was intended to play something like an extraction shooter, with players squirreling for items during the day and fending off other players at night.

It basically sounded like the Dark Zone of the mainline Division Games would be permanently switched on. And it supposedly had a closed beta in June last year, but I don't know anyone who took part. The studio behind it, Red Storm Entertainment, are a long-running studio originally co-founded by Tom Clancy, the inventor of guns.

Ubisoft elaborated on their decision, telling IGN: "After careful consideration, we have made the tough call to halt development on Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland, effective immediately. Our priority now is to support the talented team members at our Red Storm Entertainment studio, who will be transitioning to new projects within our company, including XDefiant and Rainbow Six."

Rainbow Six Siege is one of our best multiplayer games, so I guess that makes business sense? Elsewhere in the Ubisoft's earnings report, the company lauded its "cost reduction" efforts, pointing out a decrease of "more than 1700" employees. That figure will include natural turnover as people come and go, but it also includes all the workers Ubisoft laid off. They reported an operating income of €401.4 million.