Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad has not had the smoothest of rides. Their troubles started back in August 2019 upon a launch that featured a controversial cinematic trailer depicting Elite Squad’s villains – a terrorist organization named UMBRA. Thye went boasting a logo identical to the ‘raised fist’ commonly associated with civil rights activist movements like Black Lives Matter.
The game further disappointed Splinter Cell fans by bringing back Sam Fisher-not as a character in the new Splinter Cell game as fans have been demanding for years, but as a character in a mobile tactics game. The game’s poor critical reception and the use of imagery related to the BLM movement likely contributed to the company’s decision to shut Elite Squad down after only a year.
All the troubles finally lead Ubisoft to announce that it has halted the development of the game. Also, the servers will permanently shut down on October 4th of this year.
The game will continue as regular banishing the updates until October 4th, Ubisoft added and expressed hope that all players will “stick around with us.”
The closure is very engrossing overall as of Ubisoft’s newfound interest in free-to-play games. The company recently announced in May that free-to-play games represent “a great opportunity to meaningfully expand the audience of our biggest franchises,” and it is taken into action on that front with games such as the recently notified XDefiant.
Although there are no indications of a connection between the incidents, the Elite Squad closure announcement comes less than two months after the departure of Charlie Guillemot, the co-head of developer Ubisoft Owlient.
