TiMi Montreal Shuts Down Without Releasing a Game

Tencent-backed TiMi Montreal is shutting down less than five years after opening and without ever shipping a game. News of the closure began to trickle out on LinkedIn late last week, and one laid-off programmer wrote: "I am genuinely heartbroken that the public will never get to experience what this team was capable of producing." Founded in 2021, TiMi Montreal had been billed as working on "AAA open world multi-platform games" and served as the third North American office alongside TiMi Los Angeles and TiMi Seattle.

The TiMi Studio Group, known for mobile hits like Honor of Kings and Arena of Valor, had been attempting to branch into bigger-budget blockbusters. Montreal was seen as a way to attract talent from Ubisoft, and the studio counted Assassin’s Creed Valhalla creative director Ashraf Ismail among its hires after he joined TiMi in 2022 following his dismissal from Ubisoft over allegations around some of his personal romantic relationships.

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