TiMi Montreal—a studio founded back in 2021 involving former Assassin’s Creed director Ashraf Ismail—has been closed down without having released any games. As caught by Game File’s Stephen Totilo, the studio announced its closure through a post on LinkedIn that has since been taken down. Despite this closure, Ismail’s LinkedIn profile still lists him as a present creative director.
Neither TiMi Studio Group, nor parent company Tencent has provided any statement about the studio’s closure over the weekend.
When the founding of TiMi Montreal was announced, the studio was described as working on a new AAA title that would also include elements of open-world games as well as live-service titles. The project was being worked on alongside TiMi Seattle.
Considering the timing of this studio’s opening, as well as it being the third North American studio opened up under the TiMi Studio Group banner, it could be seen as part of the wave of post-pandemic investments we saw from many Chinese tech companies at the time. The gaming industry as a whole was seeing a boom thanks to lockdowns, which led to quite a bit of money flowing freely from several major gaming companies.
The closure of TiMi Montreal could be seen as a sign of Tencent slowly starting to pull back on its investments into Western game development studios. Short of an actual comment by the company, however, this is ultimately just speculation.
Fellow Chinese gaming giant NetEase had also been seen as slowly pulling back on its investments in Western game development companies around the same time last year. At the time, venture capital firm F4 Fund founder David Kaye had spoken about “the whims of certain CEOs,” referring to NetEase, and geopolitical tensions leading to investments being pulled.
“China is in retreat: geopolitical tensions, some big bets not paying off, and the whims of certain CEOs mean that a massive pullback has begun,” said Kaye. “One MAJOR strategy that has made dozens of investments in the past several years is reportedly pulling the plug and divesting ALL investments outside China. Some will likely find buyers. Others will not be so lucky.”
In its own comment, NetEase had noted that it wasn’t pulling out all of its investments, pointing to hero shooter Marvel Rivals and sci-fi survival game Once Human as its success stories.
“As far as overseas business efforts are concerned, NetEase has not wavered in its global expansion plans,” said NetEase in a statement. “Our ‘two-pronged’ approach, proposed in 2022 (combining self-research and investments to explore overseas markets), is still actively progressing and yielding positive results.”
“For titles developed by the self-owned studios, we successfully launched games like Once Human and Marvel Rivals in 2024. These projects demonstrate NetEase’s ability, along with our talented development teams, to produce high-quality games loved by players worldwide.”
For what it’s worth, Marvel Rivals has proven to be quite successful since its launch, and has also seen continued support through post-launch seasonal updates introducing new maps and playable characters to the shooter from across the Marvel multiverse.
