Ubisoft Leamington

~ the goodbye ~

Six people founded FreeStyleGames on 29 November 2002 in Leamington Spa, a Warwickshire town with a games industry attached to it. Four of them came from Codemasters and two from Rare. Their first release was B-Boy in 2006, a competitive break-dancing game on the PSP and PS2 with Crazy Legs of the Rock Steady Crew in it. It took IGN's best PSP music game award at E3 2006 and sold the way a break-dancing game on the PSP sells.

Activision noticed them through Guitar Hero downloadable content and bought the studio outright on 12 September 2008. What followed is the part anyone remembers: DJ Hero in 2009, with a plastic turntable in the box, then DJ Hero 2 the following year, by which point the plastic-instrument market was collapsing under its own release schedule. Sing Party on the Wii U came next, and then Activision asked them to work out what a new Guitar Hero would be.

The peripheral years passed Turkey by almost entirely. Those boxes were enormous and the controller was the product, so shipping a drum kit or a turntable to Ankara put the price somewhere nobody was going. The genre arrived here as footage of other people playing it, with no controller anywhere in the room.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the guitar that broke the studio ~

Guitar Hero Live came out in October 2015 with a six-button controller in two rows and live-action video instead of cartoon avatars. It was a real redesign and the reviews said so. It did not sell to Activision's projections, and on 1 April 2016 around fifty people were made redundant. Founders Jamie Jackson and David Osbourn left over it, saying plainly what they thought of how studios get treated when a game underperforms, and started Slingshot Cartel with two of the people who had just been laid off.

~ the invisible years ~

On 18 January 2017 Ubisoft bought the studio from Activision and renamed it after the town. From there the work was support: The Division and its sequel alongside Ubisoft Reflections in Newcastle, then Far Cry 5, Skull and Bones, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Star Wars Outlaws. This is most of modern game development and almost none of it is visible. A support studio's name appears deep in a credits roll nobody watches, attached to systems and environments, and the studio that made DJ Hero spent its last eight years there.

Through all of it the studio stayed where it started, employing somewhere around fifty people in a Warwickshire market town.

~ 27 january ~

Ubisoft announced the cuts in January 2025: 185 roles across Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Reflections and Leamington, with Leamington proposed for complete closure. Under British law that starts a consultation period rather than ending anything, so the studio spent two months formally discussing its own shutdown. It closed on 1 April 2025. Staff who were not laid off moved onto fully remote contracts with Ubisoft, which is how a twenty-two-year-old office becomes an address nobody goes to.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »