The Swedish gaming holding closed the Canadian studio Onoma, formerly known as Square Enix Montreal, just a few months after its purchase.
This is reported with reference to internal sources by Jason Schreier in his publication on the pages of Bloomberg. The work on the project that the team was engaged in stops. Some people will be transferred to Eidos Montreal.
The reason for the closure announced to employees is the company’s focus on PC and console games. Recall that Square Enix Montreal has always been engaged in mobile games (first of all, it is known as the developer of Hitman GO, Lara Croft GO and Deus Ex GO).
Square Enix Montreal was acquired “in a package” together with Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal from Square Enix this spring. On October 10, her new name (Onoma) and rebranding was announced.
No longer in the publication, but on his Twitter page, Schreier noted that Eidos Montreal itself, where there are no abbreviations yet, canceled the project, which was inspired by the Stranger Things series, and “revised” the game using a new IP.
The latter is still in development, but its scale has decreased. The studio also started developing a new part of Deus Ex. Plus, today she is working with Xbox on a number of projects (including helping Microsoft‘s gaming division with the new Fable).