Eidos-Montréal Lays Off 124 Employees as Wildlands, a Near-Complete AAAA Game, Gets Cancelled

Eidos-Montréal has laid off 124 employees and parted ways with its long-serving studio head, David Anfossi.

The cuts are reportedly linked to the cancellation of Wildlands, an ambitious AAAA open-world game that had been in the works since 2019.

The studio addressed the cuts in a statement shared on LinkedIn. "Today is a difficult day for our studio and reflects the need to adapt and concentrate efforts where Eidos-Montréal can be most effective," it read.

"We are deeply grateful to the team members impacted; this decision is not a reflection of their talent, dedication, or performance."

Anfossi, who had been with the studio for 19 years since joining in 2007 as a producer, also departed as part of the shake-up. The company thanked him for his contributions and confirmed that a transition plan is currently underway while new leadership is being finalized. It is worth noting that Anfossi previously worked at Ubisoft Montréal before joining Eidos.

This is not the first round of layoffs at the studio. Cuts were made in December as well, where employees reported that most projects had been cancelled. Before that, 75 employees were laid off in March 2025 and 97 positions were made redundant in January 2024.

Nearly Finished Wildlands Cancelled

At the heart of the latest round of layoffs is the cancellation of Wildlands, internally referred to as P11, as it was the 11th project in development at the studio.

According to Insider Gaming, Wildlands was an open-world, third-person action-adventure game in which players controlled a character named River. River was part of a group of teenagers called the Spiritbounds, who could fight off bad spirits using magical staffs and ride mythical creatures. River's companion was a giant moose-like animal called Redheart, which players could ride across the map.

What makes the cancellation particularly painful is that the game was reportedly nearly finished. As per reports, it had recently passed key milestones and was deep in the debugging phase, with a tentative release window planned for later in 2026.

Throughout its six-plus years of development, Wildlands went through four different game engines before eventually settling on Unreal Engine 5. There were also internal conflicts over the game's narrative direction, and the budget reportedly ballooned well beyond nine figures.

That spiralling cost had consequences beyond just Wildlands itself. A Deus Ex game, which many fans had been hoping for, was cancelled in January 2024 as a direct result of the financial strain Wildlands placed on the studio.

Eidos-Montréal was acquired by the Embracer Group in 2022 alongside Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix Montréal for 300 million dollars. A year later, Embracer launched a major restructuring program after a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group fell through. That triggered widespread layoffs, project cancellations, and studio closures across the entire Embracer portfolio.

Currently, the studio's focus appears to have shifted toward co-development work, including projects like Microsoft's Grounded 2 and Fable. Their last fully developed and released game was Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy back in 2021, which was well-received but did not meet sales expectations at the time.