The Division Heartland Cancelled by Ubisoft

Ubisoft has opted to end its development of The Division: Heartland prior to the game ever seeing the light of day. Announced all the way back in 2021, Heartland was meant to be a free-to-play spin-off in the larger The Division franchise that would feature survival elements. And while Ubisoft has held a variety of playtests for the project since first being unveiled, the publisher today informed fans that it’s scrapping work on the game entirely. 

Announced as part of Ubisoft’s latest financial earnings, the company said that The Division: Heartland has now ceased development. The reason for this move is so that the publisher can reallocate the resources that were being dedicated to the project to others within Ubisoft. Specifically, XDefiant, the new multiplayer shooter from Ubisoft releasing this month, and Rainbow Six were cited as properties that it wants to double down on with Heartland now ending. 

“As part of Ubisoft’s efforts to streamline its operations and adapt to evolving market trends, there have been further reorganizations within the Global Publishing teams, both at the APAC region, that is now organized into three engagement hubs, and at the central level,” Ubisoft said in its release. “Additionally, in line with the increased selectivity of its investments, Ubisoft has decided to stop development on The Division Heartland and has redeployed resources to bigger opportunities such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six.”

Although it’s disappointing to see that The Division: Heartland will never release, this move from Ubisoft isn’t all that surprising. In recent years, the company has started to underperform by quite a bit, which has led to Ubisoft narrowing its focus to only its biggest franchises such as Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, among others. Given how long it has been since The Division 2 released, Heartland getting canned at this point in time is a pretty logical.

Moving forward, there’s a good chance that Ubisoft will look to revisit The Division once again, perhaps with a proper third mainline installment. For the time being, though, no such plans have been announced by the company just yet, although this could change next month during the next Ubisoft Forward presentation.