A few events are happening around the two Montréal-based studios at the moment.

Square Enix Montréal (renamed to Onoma a month ago) has moved from Square Enix to the Embracer Group along with Eidos Montréal and Crystal Dynamics. Still, for now, we’ll talk about the first two studios. According to Jason Schreier, writing for Bloomberg, employees of the studio that took on the name Onoma on October 3 will be transferred to Eidos Montréal. Onoma’s closure is one of Embracer Group’s cost-cutting moves, which is why Eidos Montréal has had to down scope an unannounced project and cancel a Stranger Things-inspired game about “kids on bikes”.

Alongside the unannounced project (it will be a new IP), a new Deus Ex game is reportedly in the works. Still, development is in its infancy, and the studio is also helping Playground Games, under Xbox Game Studios, with the Fable reboot. We wrote earlier about Deus Ex that the team is trying to do what CD Projekt RED couldn’t with Cyberpunk 2077, so that’s something to look forward to. The fact that Eidos Montréal is helping out with Fable isn’t a big surprise: after all, Crystal Dynamics is also helping The Initiative with the Perfect Dark reboot.

It’s worth considering what Onoma was working on under its previous name. They were the originators of the mobile Hitman Go, and Deus Ex Go, so they might have been familiar mainly to people playing on iOS and/or Android. It does make you wonder, though, if Eidos Montréal and Crystal Dynamics are helping Microsoft, why didn’t Xbox boss Phil Spencer buy the three studios from Square Enix? After all, the cost of doing so would have been a fraction of Activision Blizzard’s nearly $70 billion (and still unapproved) transaction…

Of course, what Schreier wrote is not yet official, but the word “cost-cutting” is heard in many places these days…

Source: WCCFTech