What to know
- Tencent has shut down TiMi Montreal, a studio it opened in 2021.
- The studio never released a game publicly in its almost five years of operation.
- Closure was first confirmed via LinkedIn posts from former employees; Tencent has not commented.
- The shutdown reflects broader challenges in overseas AAA game development and a pullback by some Chinese publishers.
You should know that in February 2026 Tencent quietly closed its TiMi Montreal game development studio — a unit of its TiMi Studio Group — after nearly five years of operation. The announcement came not from Tencent itself, but through posts by former employees on LinkedIn confirming the closure.
TiMi Montreal was established in 2021 with the explicit goal of creating “AAA open-world, multi-platform games”, positioning itself as a Western-based extension of TiMi’s successful global franchises. Despite this ambition and industry experience among its leadership, including veterans from major Western titles, the studio never publicly released a completed original game during its existence.
Employees had reportedly been aware for weeks that a shutdown was possible before the final closure took place. One developer described on social media how the team had been anticipating the news and voiced disappointment that the public would “never get to experience what this team was capable of producing.”
Tencent and TiMi Studio Group have so far offered no official statement or details about the reasons behind the shutdown or the fate of any of the projects the studio was developing.
Industry observers see this closure as part of a wider retrenchment in Western AAA game development by large Chinese publishers, including Tencent and others, who have scaled back some overseas studio investments. High production costs and shifting market priorities have made sustaining large, console-style game projects outside their home regions more challenging.
For players and developers alike, TiMi Montreal’s closure is a reminder of how ambitious game projects can falter even with substantial backing, and how quickly strategic shifts in the global games industry can affect studios that have yet to deliver a product to the public.
