Ubisoft cancels The Division Heartland

Ubisoft has announced the cancellation of Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland.

The French company explained that the reason for this is “a reallocation of resources towards broader opportunities such as XDefiant or Rainbow Six” and that the move is part of a process of restructuring teams, cutting costs and concentrating resources on fewer but larger games. .

Heartland is a free-to-play spin-off of The Division announced in 2021 and developed by Red Storm Entertainment. It had a few delays throughout production, but it did get some testing done, and it even recently received an age rating in Taiwan, which indicated that if it wasn’t finished, it was very close to being finished indeed.

The cancellation of Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland is not the only decision Ubisoft has made recently. Last year, the sequel Immortals Fenyx Rising was confirmed to be canceled, as well as Project Q, a PvP shooter. A year earlier, in 2022, it also abruptly canceled four games that had not yet been announced.

In the latest financial results presented this morning, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot assured that they are “on track again” for a “profitable growth trajectory.”

The plan for the future is to “take back” its leadership in open-world games (such as the recently announced Assassin’s Creed Shadows) and expand its games-as-a-service offerings.

As for launch, they are planning to publish Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Star Wars Outlaws, XDefiant, The Division Resurgence and Rainbow Six Mobile this year.

Finally, Guillemot commented that the company is going to split its internal engines into two branches, Anvil and Snowdrop, and that it is going to “aggressively” develop generative AI technology, especially through the NEO NPC program.