Just a year after launch, Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad is officially having its’ plug pulled. It’s been a wild ride trying to keep up with this game’s development and inevitable destruction, but it looks like Ubisoft has officially had enough of struggling to keep this game profitable and will be shutting down all servers October 4th, 2021.
News of the game’s official shutdown came in a developer blogpost from the game’s official website. The dev team took a moment to express how much they appreciate all the support fans have offered throughout Elite Squad’s lifecycle before confirming that the game would no longer be receiving support come October.
It is with a great deal of sadness that we are announcing we will no longer be releasing new content for Elite Squad. Today’s update will be our last, and on October 4th, 2021 we will shut the servers down. This was not an easy decision, but after exploring multiple options with our teams, we came to the conclusion that it was no longer sustainable.
For those keeping up with Elite Squad in the news, this information might not come as a huge surprise considering it’s difficult launch, which included an intro video likening international terrorism to the BLM movement. The game’s lead antagonists, terrorist organization Umbra, used symbols which were nearly identical to those used by BLM: A mix-up which landed the game in hot water right off the starting line. After updating the game, removing the introductory cutscene and issuing numerous apologies, the development team still wasn’t quite out of the clear.
Soon after the controversy, Axios reports that Owlient, the lead development team behind Elite Squad, lost both of its’ co-heads: Rémi Pellerin and Charlie Guillemot. If the latter name sounds familiar, it might be because Charlie shares the same last name as his father, Yves Guillemot, the CEO of Ubisoft. Whether this had anything to do with Elite Squad’s immediate issues after launch is unclear, but needless to say, this change did not provide the stability a new studio needs to release and maintain active-service games like Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, likely leading only to more disorder behind the scenes.
Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad will shut down October 4th, 2021, so players should enjoy the game while they still can.