Tencent has shut down its TiMi Montreal studio without it releasing a game in the five years of its existence.
Game File sources had indicated for weeks that a closure was coming, but I had been unable to corroborate firmly enough to publish. The rumor resurfaced again on Friday when a source told me shutdown was imminent.
And now I’ve spotted that, on Friday, a programmer at TiMi Montreal posted on LinkedIn that the studio had officially closed. Workers had been aware this was coming “for some time,” they wrote, but added that “I am genuinely heartbroken that the public will never get to experience what this team was capable of producing.”
Others affiliated with the studio also posted about the closure on LinkedIn.
Reps for Tencent/TiMi did not provide comment when contacted Friday or again today.
TiMi Montreal was announced in July 2021, with a mission “to create AAA open world multi-platform games.”
That news came amidst rapid expansion of game studios worldwide, super-charged by the pandemic-era boom in gaming and global investors’ desire to capitalize.
A significant amount of the expansion at the time was fueled by Chinese gaming giants NetEase and Tencent, firms with massive success in their home region and on mobile that saw opportunities to build studios that could succeed with more console-style games. Both firms aggressively stood up studios in the west, often with lead developers who had big-budget game releases from western publishers on their resume. But few games have come from those efforts and a retreat from that strategy has been evident over the past 18 months. (I reported almost exactly a year ago that NetEase has been pulling funding from many such studios in the west.)
Details of what Tencent’s TiMi Montreal was working on have not surfaced, but the ambition behind the studio was obvious: