Kingdom Come Creator Roasts Ubisoft's 16,600 Staff

"Ubisoft has 16,600 employees after layoffs. Ooops. Thats about 70 Warhorse sized studios."

That's Daniel Vávra, co-founder of Warhorse Studios and the creative force behind the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series, doing some very public arithmetic on X at Ubisoft's expense. He went further, calculating that 16,600 people would be enough to produce 10 AAA games the size of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, "each developed for 7 years, released every year." He capped it off by wondering aloud whether he should buy Ubisoft stock now that the price has cratered.

It's the kind of post that reads like a joke but cuts because the math isn't wrong. Warhorse operates with roughly 230 to 240 people. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 shipped to a 9/10 from IGN and widespread critical praise. Ubisoft, with nearly 70 times the staff, posted record losses of 1.3 billion this fiscal year and is still mid-layoff. Vávra isn't saying anything the numbers don't already say, but hearing it from a studio head who just announced two new open-world RPGs in the same week gives the dig a lot more weight.

Warhorse's Two-Game Flex

The timing of Vávra's post is not accidental. Days earlier, Warhorse revealed it's simultaneously developing a new Kingdom Come game and an open-world Lord of the Rings RPG. During a community livestream, PR lead Tobias Stolz-Zwilling confirmed both are full open-world RPGs, not spinoff media or mobile projects. "You can expect two open-world RPGs," he said. "One is a Kingdom Come open-world RPG, the other one is a Middle-Earth open-world RPG. Both of them are coming."

The new Kingdom Come title is targeting a release within Embracer's next fiscal year, which runs April 2027 to March 2028. Stolz-Zwilling acknowledged the usual caveats about game development timelines but stressed that fans "probably don't have to wait seven years for another Kingdom Come." Prokop Jirsa, a designer on Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, is stepping up as creative lead on the franchise, while design director Viktor Bocan will head the Lord of the Rings team. Vávra himself has moved to lead a Kingdom Come movie or TV adaptation.

So Warhorse, a studio of roughly 240 people, is juggling two ambitious open-world RPGs and a screen adaptation. Ubisoft, with 16,600 employees post-layoffs, is banking its recovery on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, a remake of a 2013 game launching July 9, plus multiple Far Cry and Assassin's Creed projects that CEO Yves Guillemot has described as "very promising" without showing much of substance.

I'm not going to pretend Vávra's comparison is perfectly apples-to-apples. Ubisoft runs live services, maintains legacy games across dozens of platforms, and operates global offices with all the overhead that entails. You can't just divide headcount by game size and call it a productivity metric. But that's also sort of the point. Ubisoft built a machine so large that it needs blockbuster hits just to justify its own existence, and when those hits stop coming, the bloat becomes impossible to ignore. Warhorse never scaled to that size, which means it never needed to.

The Warhorse Studios Twitter account posted a recap of the livestream on May 22, keeping the tone professional and focused on the two RPG announcements. Vávra's personal account, meanwhile, was doing the victory lap. There's a clear good-cop-bad-cop dynamic here, and I suspect Warhorse is perfectly happy letting its co-founder say what the company account can't.

What makes this sting for Ubisoft isn't the mockery itself. Studios take shots at each other all the time. It's that Vávra is punching from a position of strength. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was one of 2025's best-reviewed RPGs. The Lord of the Rings license is one of the most coveted properties in entertainment. And the studio just announced a new Kingdom Come game that could ship in under two years. Ubisoft, meanwhile, is restructuring, bleeding money, and leaning on remakes of games that are over a decade old.

The dropped "Deliverance" from the new Kingdom Come title is an interesting wrinkle, too. It suggests this won't be a direct continuation of Henry's story, possibly a new protagonist or a different era entirely. With a potential release less than a year away, Warhorse may have been quietly building this for a while, which would explain Vávra's confidence. You don't mock a company 70 times your size unless you're feeling pretty good about your own hand.

Ubisoft has confirmed it still has several major projects in the pipeline, and a successful Black Flag Resynced launch could shift the narrative. But right now, are rough: a 240-person studio announcing two open-world RPGs while a 16,600-person publisher struggles to ship one remake on time. Vávra's post had no business being as effective as it was, but the numbers did most of the work for him.