Halifax is one of the cheapest places globally to rent office space and employ talented software developers with a CS degree. I am skeptical that it was on the chopping block before now.

Original: The layoffs across the video game industry are getting started early in 2026. Ubisoft has announced the closure of Ubisoft Halifax.

The closure will see 71 people lose their jobs.

The news of the studio’s shutdown comes just days after it was announced that 61 of the studio’s employees joined the Game & Media Workers Guild of Canada, Local 30111. The certification for the union came on December 18, 2025, and was branded as the Ubisoft Workers of Canada, Halifax.

In a statement, Ubisoft says that decision comes after two years of “company-wide actions to streamline operations”.

“Over the past 24 months, Ubisoft has undertaken company-wide actions to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs,” the company said. “As part of this, Ubisoft has made the difficult decision to close its Halifax studio. 71 positions will be affected.

“We are committed to supporting all impacted team members during this transition with resources, including comprehensive severance packages and additional career assistance.”

The decision, Ubisoft claims, was made “well before” the staff unionized. Ubisoft added that it respected its employees right to join a union. Insider Gaming has reached out for a statement from members of the Union. Should that be received, it will be added to this story.

Prior to its closure, Ubisoft Halifax was working on mobile games for Rainbow Six and Assassin’s Creed.

This was actually a decent skim. Microsoft did not think that one through.

Companies paying for a corporate copilot instance to train on their SharePoint documents can inadvertently reveal the contents of those documents to anyone in the company who asks Copilot about them, even if those documents were made highly restricted - in their example, a document full of service account passwords permissioned to only be accessible by a select few members of IT (although sensible IT would be using a password manager right?)

Quite the oversight! That’s sure to slow adoption in any shops with a zero-trust or principle of least pivilege model in place, or even anywhere big that segments their teams to cut down on noise.

and I can get a discount!

I’ve done this before. Sometimes, I’ll try to grab something from a few different sources because I dont know what will go fastest. Once a clear “winner” emerges, I cancel the rest. I wouldn’t worry about it. And thanks for being a sharer!

You could always test things from another device in the house. Since traffic is going through the VPN, it should be about as slow as any remote user.

A good decompiler and an auto-formatter might leave them with a nicer copy of their source code than they had in the first place.

EQ is earthquake. According to USGS, California faces a ~75% chance of a major earthquake in the next 100 years.

Have a quick google of “California quake risk” for a slew of in-depth (and somewhat scary) articles and research papers.

I would have thought California EQ was the peril scaring them all away. Very expensive to reinsure - most commercial property catasrophy models (RMS & AIR are the big ones) peg it as the second most risky North American peril after Florida Hurricane.

I appreciate you exploring your sense of humour, but let’s stop using gay as an insult.