Ubisoft has acquired Amazon Games Montreal and the rights to the studio's in-development MOBA March of Giants, the company announced on 15th December — two months after Amazon cut deep into its video game division as part of 14,000 company-wide layoffs.

The financial terms "are not being disclosed," Ubisoft said, but the agreement includes a notable operational detail: Amazon has committed to providing marketing support for March of Giants on Twitch, keeping the platform giant invested in the game's launch even after selling the studio that makes it.

The acquisition moves the Amazon Games Montreal team — including former Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege creative director Xavier Marquis — back under Ubisoft's roof. Marquis originally left Ubisoft in 2019 and joined Amazon in 2021 to help build the Montreal studio. Alexandre Parizeau is also returning; Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot explicitly named both in his statement welcoming the team back.

Why does Ubisoft want a MOBA now?

Ubisoft's rationale rests on market growth projections. The company said it expects the global MOBA games market to "continue growing year over year for the rest of the decade, with total revenues roughly doubling by 2030" — an estimate Ubisoft itself cites as the basis for the purchase.

It described March of Giants as "an innovative and differentiated project with the potential to offer something new to current MOBA fans, attract new audiences, and grow into a successful live competitive game."

Guillemot framed the deal as both a product bet and a talent play: "March of Giants has a real opportunity to bring something fresh and dynamic to players, and to help Ubisoft compete in one of gaming's biggest arenas."

He added: "We're looking forward to welcoming back Alexandre [Parizeau], Xavier, and many of the seasoned March of Giants team who have previously worked at Ubisoft, and the entire team's ambition, creativity and talent align perfectly with our desire to build bold new experiences for players."

What does this mean for Amazon's games strategy?

The sale is the most concrete fallout yet from Amazon's October retrenchment. According to Bloomberg, Amazon "gutted" its games division as part of sweeping layoffs across the company.

At the time, Steven Boom, Amazon's vice president of Audio, Twitch and Games, told employees the company had "made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs," resulting in "significant role reductions in our studios in Irvine and San Diego, as well as our central publishing team."

The consequences were immediate:

• Ongoing development work on the New World MMO ceased, with no guarantee the game would live past 2026.
• A former Amazon developer suggested the company's Lord of the Rings MMO had also been cancelled.
• Montreal, the studio built around AAA leadership recruited in 2021, is now sold rather than shuttered — the relatively softer landing in Amazon's retreat from first-party AAA development.

For studios and teams watching from the outside, the deal sketches two different exits from a corporate retrenchment: layoffs in Irvine, San Diego and central publishing on one track, an acquisition by a publisher with a strategic interest in the genre on the other. Ubisoft gets experienced live-service talent with shipped competitive credentials at a moment when it wants to compete in MOBAs; Amazon sheds a studio while retaining some marketing upside through Twitch.

The deal also signals how publishers are shopping distressed first-party projects. A title halted for strategic reasons inside one corporation can still carry value for another whose portfolio strategy points in the opposite direction — toward live competitive games rather than away from them.

March of Giants now continues under Ubisoft ownership with its original team largely intact and its former creative director back at the company where he built his reputation. Whether Twitch marketing support translates into meaningful player acquisition for a new MOBA in a genre dominated by entrenched incumbents is the question that will define the deal's value — and Ubisoft's undisclosed price leaves the market to judge the bet on results rather than numbers.