Warhorse Studios co-founder Daniel Vávra has never been one to mince words, and his latest social media broadside takes direct aim at Ubisoft’s staggering scale versus its recent output. In a post that has quickly circulated through the gaming community, Vávra calculated that the French publisher’s workforce of 16,600 employees effectively equals about 70 studios the size of his own team. The implication, delivered with a sharp edge of irony, is that Ubisoft possesses the theoretical manpower to deliver ten AAA games of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s caliber every single year — if only that potential were being realized.
The Math Behind the Mockery
Vávra’s arithmetic is straightforward and deliberately provocative. With approximately 16,600 staff remaining after Ubisoft’s recent rounds of layoffs, he estimates that this workforce could be reconstituted into roughly seventy development teams matching Warhorse’s headcount. From that premise, he extrapolates a hypothetical production pipeline: ten games equivalent in scope and quality to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, each receiving a seven-year development cycle, could theoretically be finished and launched annually. The post concludes with a wry question about whether he should buy Ubisoft shares at their current depressed price — a pointed reference to his earlier admission that he once held the company’s stock and suffered significant losses on the position.
The tweet, published on May 21, 2026, landed during one of the most turbulent periods in Ubisoft’s corporate history. The company has been navigating a profound restructuring that included a substantial reduction in its global workforce, a process that insiders confirm is still ongoing. Just months earlier, Ubisoft reported a record net loss of €1.3 billion for the fiscal year, a figure that stunned investors even as management expressed optimism about a rebound in coming periods. The stock market reacted harshly, with shares plummeting 39 percent in a single day following the restructuring announcement, erasing billions in market capitalization.
Ubisoft’s Structural Dilemma
Vávra’s commentary, while delivered with evident sarcasm, touches on a structural question that has long surrounded Ubisoft: how can a company with tens of thousands of employees, dozens of studios across multiple continents, and some of the industry’s most valuable intellectual properties find itself struggling to consistently deliver hit games? The answer, according to industry observers, lies partly in the very decentralization that allows Ubisoft to operate globally. The company’s network spans development teams in France, Canada, China, Romania, Ukraine, Japan, and beyond, each with its own management layers, cultural dynamics, and operational priorities. Coordinating such a sprawling enterprise inevitably introduces inefficiencies that a centralized studio like Warhorse, based entirely in the Czech Republic, simply does not confront.
Warhorse itself operates with a lean, focused structure. The studio employs around 230 people, a fraction of Ubisoft’s total headcount, and all development work occurs within a single location under a unified creative vision. This model allowed the team to deliver Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to critical and commercial success, with the game widely praised for its historical authenticity, narrative depth, and technical polish. The contrast between Warhorse’s focused output and Ubisoft’s more diffuse production pipeline could hardly be starker.
A History of Cancellations and Missed Opportunities
Vávra’s jab gains additional weight when considered against Ubisoft’s recent track record of project cancellations. Earlier this year, the company confirmed that it had pulled the plug on six titles in development, including a highly anticipated remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and delayed seven others. These decisions reflect a broader pattern of strategic realignment that has seen the publisher abandon projects mid-development, sometimes after years of investment, in favor of refocusing on its most established franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
The cancellation of the Prince of Persia remake was particularly notable, as it represented a project that had been officially announced, shown to the public, and positioned as a major release before being quietly shelved. For critics of Ubisoft’s management approach, such episodes illustrate a systemic problem: the company’s decentralized structure can lead to fragmented decision-making, overlapping initiatives, and a lack of clear accountability that ultimately wastes both time and money. Vávra’s hypothetical calculation of ten AAA games per year is, of course, deliberately unrealistic, but it serves to underscore the perception that Ubisoft’s massive headcount has not translated into proportional output or quality.
The Personal Dimension
Vávra’s commentary is not purely analytical; it carries a personal edge rooted in his own history with the company. The Warhorse co-founder has acknowledged in the past that he owned Ubisoft shares and sustained considerable financial losses on that investment. His question about buying the current dip is therefore layered with irony, hinting at a skepticism born of direct experience. It also aligns with his broader outspoken persona, which has courted controversy on multiple occasions, including his recent public defense of a same-sex romance storyline in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 that drew both praise and criticism from different quarters of the gaming community.
Vávra’s own trajectory adds further context to his remarks. He recently announced that he is stepping away from game development to focus on producing a film adaptation of the Kingdom Come universe, a transition that he has framed as a natural evolution rather than a departure from the franchise. He remains at Warhorse in a different capacity, but his shift in focus suggests that even the founder of a successful studio sees limits to how long he wants to remain inside the AAA development cycle. That perspective gives his critique of Ubisoft’s scale and inefficiency an added layer of authenticity.
Scale Versus Agility
The underlying debate that Vávra’s post reignites is one of the most persistent in modern game development: does size confer advantage, or does it become a liability? Ubisoft’s defenders point out that the company’s global network enables it to develop multiple major releases simultaneously, maintain live-service titles, and support a vast catalog of games across all platforms. The sheer volume of content produced by Ubisoft each year remains unmatched by most competitors, and the company’s best-performing titles continue to generate substantial revenue.
Yet critics argue that scale without discipline creates bloat. Ubisoft has been accused of formulaic game design, risk-averse project selection, and a corporate culture that prioritizes shareholder returns over creative innovation. The company’s recent restructuring, which included the creation of five new creative houses each responsible for specific franchises, was explicitly designed to streamline decision-making and improve accountability. Whether that reorganisation will achieve its goals remains an open question, but the move itself is an acknowledgment that the previous structure was not working optimally.
What the Numbers Actually Mean
It is worth examining Vávra’s calculation more carefully. The assertion that 16,600 employees could produce ten Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2-sized games annually depends on several assumptions that do not hold in practice. Game development is not a perfectly scalable activity. A studio of 230 people working on one game for seven years benefits from deep institutional knowledge, stable team dynamics, and accumulated technical expertise. Spreading that same headcount across seventy smaller teams would introduce coordination costs, duplicate overhead functions, and dilute the concentration of talent that makes a single project successful.
Moreover, Ubisoft’s workforce includes not just development teams but also publishing, marketing, localization, quality assurance, customer support, corporate administration, and a host of other functions that a smaller independent studio like Warhorse does not maintain at the same scale. A direct headcount comparison between a fully integrated publisher and a pure development studio necessarily overstates the number of people actually building games. Even so, the core of Vávra’s critique remains difficult to dismiss entirely: an organization of Ubisoft’s size should, in theory, be capable of more consistent output than it has demonstrated in recent years.
The Broader Industry Context
Vávra’s intervention comes at a moment when the entire video game industry is grappling with questions of scale, efficiency, and sustainability. The post-pandemic contraction has led to widespread layoffs across major publishers and developers, with tens of thousands of jobs eliminated since 2023. Ubisoft is far from alone in facing financial pressure, but its losses and workforce reductions have been among the most visible. The company’s struggles are often attributed to a combination of factors: increased development costs, longer production cycles, changing player preferences, and heightened competition from both independent studios and platform-exclusive titles.
At the same time, the success of games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 demonstrates that there is still a robust market for single-player, narrative-driven experiences that prioritize craftsmanship over monetization. Warhorse’s approach — a focused team, a clear creative vision, and a willingness to take risks on historical settings and unconventional storytelling — stands in contrast to the blockbuster model favored by larger publishers, which often involves multiple studios, extensive outsourcing, and a tendency toward safe, iterative design. The fact that Vávra’s studio delivered a hit while Ubisoft struggles with cancellations and losses has not gone unnoticed by industry analysts.
The Stock Market Question
Vávra’s closing question about buying the dip is more than a throwaway joke. Ubisoft’s share price has experienced extreme volatility during the restructuring period, and some investors see the current low valuation as an entry point for a potential recovery. The company has signaled that it expects a significant financial rebound in the coming fiscal years, driven by a pipeline of major releases and cost savings from the restructuring. Whether that optimism is justified remains uncertain, and Vávra’s own experience with the stock suggests that he, at least, is not convinced the bottom has been reached.
For Warhorse, the question of scale is largely academic. The studio has no plans to expand dramatically, and Vávra’s departure from day-to-day development reinforces the company’s philosophy of staying lean and focused. The film project he is pursuing represents a new direction for the Kingdom Come brand, but it also reflects a recognition that there are creative avenues beyond the AAA game development cycle that can be equally rewarding. That outlook, coming from someone who has succeeded in that very cycle, carries weight.
The Deeper Lesson
What Vávra’s tweet ultimately captures is not just a critique of one company, but a broader observation about the video game industry’s relationship with size. For years, the prevailing logic held that bigger studios, bigger budgets, and bigger teams would inevitably produce better results. That assumption is now under serious examination, as publishers with thousands of employees announce layoffs and cancellations while smaller teams achieve critical and commercial breakthroughs. The math that Vávra laid out may be deliberately oversimplified, but the question it raises is fundamental: what does all that scale actually buy?
Ubisoft’s leadership would likely argue that its size allows it to take on projects that a studio like Warhorse could never attempt — massive open worlds, persistent online ecosystems, cross-media franchises that span film, television, and merchandise. There is truth to that argument, but it does not fully explain why the company has struggled to maintain consistency even in its core areas of strength. The restructuring currently underway is an attempt to answer that question internally, but external critics like Vávra are not waiting for the results.
As the industry continues to evolve, the tension between centralization and decentralization, between agility and scale, will only become more pronounced. Warhorse’s model offers one path forward: small, independent, and creative. Ubisoft’s model offers another: large, diversified, and global. Neither is inherently superior, but Vávra’s intervention serves as a reminder that the latter approach has yet to deliver on its full promise. Whether Ubisoft can close that gap in the coming years will determine not just its own future, but also the direction of the broader AAA landscape.
