As part of a big earnings call over at mega game maker Ubisoft, The Division: Heartland has officially been cancelled. In development for a number of years over at Red Storm Entertainment, Heartland was set to be a free-to-play, extraction-themed spinoff of Ubisoft's The Division series.

Now though, the game has met the chopping block as the company decided to "redeploy resources to bigger opportunities". Here's a bit more about the team's decision to cancel The Division: Heartland:

"After careful consideration, we have made the tough call to halt development on Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland, effective immediately. Our priority now is to support the talented team members at our Red Storm Entertainment studio, who will be transitioning to new projects within our company, including XDefiant and Rainbow Six."

It's always hard to wrap your head around these sorts of decisions — especially when we've seen extended gameplay on Heartland as little as a year ago — but this move likely comes down to the amount of support a game like this needs to be successful. Live service titles require quite a lot of upkeep, and clearly, Ubisoft wants to pump those resources into XDefiant and Rainbow Six instead.

Speaking of XDefiant, we're quite excited about that one in particular. Ubisoft San Francisco's free-to-play shooter releases in less than a week, and we were rather impressed by the game's recent server stress test on Xbox. It wasn't perfect, but the more resources this one can get to potentially develop into proper competition for Call of Duty, the better!

What do you make of this move from Ubisoft? Tell us your thoughts down below.

[source ign.com]