Ubisoft Wants to Close RedLynx, the Studio Behind Trials, and Cut 70 Positions in Singapore. What's Confirmed and What It Means

Some game news lands like a thunderclap. This one landed like a door closing quietly down the hall. On Wednesday, October 14, Ubisoft put forward a proposal to close RedLynx, the Helsinki studio that has spent most of its life making Trials, and to cut 70 positions at Ubisoft Singapore.

Ubisoft's year has been rough by most accounts, and it's easy to let all of that heat wash over one story and blur it. So I'm going to keep two things apart: what Ubisoft has actually put on the table, and what people are inferring from it. Then I'll tell you where I land, which is somewhere more hopeful than the headlines, though not naive.

What's actually on the table

Here is the split I promised, with the confirmed on the left and the open questions on the right. The left column leans on Kotaku's report of Ubisoft's statement, VGC's reporting and RedLynx's own 2025 announcement.

One more caution on the numbers. “Around 52” is VGC's wording, and Kotaku repeats 52. I'd treat it as the working figure until the negotiations produce something more exact.

Why “proposal” is the word that matters

If you read Ubisoft's wording closely, it says proposal, not decision. That isn't corporate softening. VGC explains that in Finland, a company that employs at least 50 people and makes a decision that affects positions has to hold mandatory employer-employee talks, called change negotiations. Kotaku adds that the law wants the process to be anticipatory, meaning the company has to open the talks before the outcome is settled.

I'm not a labor lawyer, and I won't pretend to predict how these talks end. What I can say is how last year's round was laid out. RedLynx's own announcement from October 2025 said the negotiations would begin on October 30 and run until about the end of November, and that they concerned the production and administration teams, not the technology team working on Ubisoft's Snowdrop engine. I haven't found a schedule for this new round, so I'm not going to guess one.

Here's the honest summary: the proposal is serious, the process is real, and the outcome isn't written yet.

Twenty-six years of RedLynx, by year

Context helps here, because this didn't happen overnight. I built this list from VGC's account, RedLynx's own announcement and the series' release history, and I kept it to things I could verify.

• 2000RedLynx is founded in Helsinki. VGC dates the studio's formation to that year.
• 2009Trials HD arrives on Xbox Live Arcade. VGC calls it the studio's breakout hit, and it's the game that led to Ubisoft's interest.
• 2011Ubisoft acquires RedLynx.
• 2012Trials Evolution. The first Trials game released after the Ubisoft deal.
• 2014Trials Fusion and Trials Frontier. Fusion launched on April 16 for PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, with a PC release following on April 24. Frontier was the mobile counterpart.
• 2016Trials of the Blood Dragon. A spin-off set in the neon, 1980s-action-movie world of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
• 2019Trials Rising (February 26). It is the most recent entry in the series.
• 2020A different kind of work. RedLynx helped Massive Entertainment bring The Division 2 to Google Stadia, according to VGC.
• 2023Gwen's Getaway soft launches. VGC says the mobile game was shut down in December 2024.
• 2025First restructuring proposal. Up to 60 positions, with the studio refocused on “small screens,” meaning mobile, per RedLynx's announcement. Kotaku reports it cost more than half the workforce.
• 2026Closure proposal. Reported October 14, along with the Singapore cuts.

Look at the shape of that list. A burst of ideas between 2009 and 2019, then seven quieter years. Kotaku points to the same gap, noting it has been seven years since a new Trials game. A studio can survive a long gap, but it's hard to survive one without a project to point to.

The detail I can't stop thinking about

VGC's report says Ubisoft concluded that RedLynx isn't working on a new project and that making it smaller wouldn't keep it sustainable. VGC frames that as what it understands, not as something Ubisoft said on the record, so I'm treating it as reporting.

Here's what makes it knotty. In October 2025, Ubisoft's own announcement said RedLynx was leading two unannounced mobile projects. Kotaku's John Walker finds it hard to believe the studio has nothing in the works, partly because of that statement and partly because a team of that size is presumably doing something. He also argues that the Trials format, a 2D obstacle course, is a natural fit for touchscreens.

I'd stay a step more careful. Both things can be true: those two projects existed in 2025, and they aren't a going concern now. Projects get cancelled, merged or paused all the time, and I don't know which happened here. Nobody outside Ubisoft does. I'd rather say that plainly than build a theory on a gap in the record.

Singapore, the other half of the news

It would be a mistake to let the Trials angle swallow the second story. VGC says Ubisoft Singapore was founded in 2008 to build a production network in Southeast Asia. Since then it has supported most of the Assassin's Creed games released to date and led two projects of its own: Skull and Bones and Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced.

That last one is the part that stays with me. Kotaku reports that Black Flag Resynced sold more than 3.5 million copies in its first two weeks, and it still wasn't enough to avoid this downsizing. Ubisoft's stated reason is aligning the studio with upcoming production needs. I read that as a reminder that a successful game and a safe studio are two separate things. When a company reorganizes around what it plans to build next, last year's hit isn't a shield.

Three ways to read this

I keep seeing this story told in one voice. I think there are at least three honest ones, and each of them is partly right.

My own view is that all three are true at once, which is why this story feels so heavy and so unresolved. The numbers are cold, the process is slow and the loss is personal.

My three questions for Ubisoft

If I had a few minutes with the people making this decision, here's what I'd ask. These are my questions, not claims.

• What happens to the Trials name?A studio can close while the series it made continues somewhere else, or never does. Players deserve to know which of those it is.
• What became of the two mobile projects?Ubisoft named them in 2025 as the reason for the refocus. If they're gone, saying so would clear up a lot of speculation.
• Does the proposal include the Snowdrop technology team?RedLynx's 2025 announcement said that team wasn't part of that round of negotiations. It's reasonable to ask whether the same is true now.

Why this isn't an obituary

I'm not going to write a eulogy, because nobody has announced a death. What I'm going to write is a small defense of the idea.

Trials is a motorbike, a track full of things that shouldn't be rideable and a restart that's always close at hand. That's it. It's one of the cleanest ideas in games, and clean ideas tend to survive the buildings they were born in. The people who made it spent years teaching a lot of players that failing fast and trying again can be a joy and not a punishment.

So here's the hopeful part, and I mean it as an observation, not a promise: the series doesn't live only in a Helsinki office. It lives in the games that exist, in the players who still replay them and in the craft that the people at RedLynx developed. Whatever comes out of the negotiations, that work happened and it was good.

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