Square Enix Montréal

~ the eulogy ~

In June 2020 Zynga paid 1.8 billion dollars for Peak, an Istanbul company whose games were free to install and asked you to match colored blocks. Two years later a studio in Montréal that made paid mobile puzzle games out of Hitman and Tomb Raider was closed by its new owner, ten weeks after being bought, because phones were not the business that owner wanted to be in. Both of those things happened in the same industry inside the same five-year window.

Square Enix Montréal opened on 21 November 2011, set up by Lee Singleton, who was running Square Enix's London studios at the time, and later led by Patrick Naud. The brief was mobile, and the specific version of mobile it meant was premium: pay once at the door, take a console property and rebuild it small.

Hitman GO arrived in April 2014 and it is still the thing the studio is remembered for. It turned a stealth-assassination series into a turn-based board game with plastic-looking figurines on a diorama, and it worked, both as a puzzle game and as an argument that a big franchise could be reduced to its logic and lose nothing. Lara Croft GO followed in 2015 and Deus Ex GO in 2016. Hitman: Sniper, a single-screen sniping game rather than a puzzle, also came out in 2015.

Then Square Enix sold its Western business. Embracer Group completed the purchase of the Montréal studio along with Eidos and Crystal Dynamics on 26 August 2022 for 300 million dollars, a price that startled everyone who looked at what was in the package. The studio had 160 people, 144 of them in Montréal and 16 in London. Ten weeks later it did not exist.

~ the dossier ~

~ the go games ~

The GO series was three games over three years and the closest the industry got to a house style for premium mobile. Each one took a console franchise, found the single mechanic underneath it, and rebuilt that mechanic as a grid you moved pieces on. Hitman became a puzzle about patrol routes. Lara Croft became a puzzle about levers and ledges. They were sold once, for a few dollars, with nothing to buy inside them, on a store where the top-grossing chart had already been settled by games that were free at the door and charged forever after.

~ three weeks as onoma ~

In October 2022 Embracer renamed the studio Onoma. The stated reason was that a new name would let it connect with multiple audiences rather than sit under a Japanese publisher's brand it no longer belonged to, which is a reasonable thing to do with a studio you have just bought and intend to keep. There was a new logo and a new wordmark and presumably a fair amount of internal work getting people to use the new name.

On the morning of 1 November, Embracer told the staff the studio was being closed. Some were offered positions at Eidos-Montréal in the same city. The reason given was that the group wanted to concentrate on console and PC players, which had been just as true in August as it was in November. The new name had been in use for about three weeks.

~ the shutdown notices ~

The games went down on a published schedule, which is more than most closing mobile studios manage. In-app purchases were switched off immediately in November 2022. Deus Ex GO and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes came off the app stores on 1 December, along with Arena Battle Champions and Hitman Sniper: The Shadows. All four stopped working on 4 January 2023.

That is the part worth sitting with. Several of these were single-player puzzle games, bought once and built to be finished alone, and they were switched off anyway, because a modern mobile game phones home whether or not its design requires it. A studio that spent a decade arguing you could own a mobile game the way you owned a boxed one was closed by a company that then proved the opposite on its own catalog.

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