Ubisoft’s remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was one of six projects recently cancelled as part of a “major reset” of the company’s internal structure. One day after the announcement, which included a promise that more “player-facing generative AI” was on the cards, Ubisoft shares dropped to their lowest value in more than 14 years.
Rubbing some salt in the wound, Reddit posts claiming to come from a developer who worked on the project say that “it was close to the finish line.” The redditor, posting under the name SocramVelmar, wrote “Although the game was close to release, development stopped suddenly due to internal uncertainty and concerns around layoffs. With things unclear, some of the team moved on to other studios that offered more stability.”
Basically, a failure’s going to be worse for Ubisoft than cutting its losses even late in the production. Not just financially, but reputationally—and nowadays there’s an expectation of post-launch support that means even a “finished” game isn’t really finished, resulting in an even greater investment of resources.
SocramVelmar also says games like The Sands of Time struggled to find a place in Ubisoft’s current direction. “There’s been a big push toward large, open-world experiences for a while,” they wrote, “and that makes it harder for tighter, linear games to find oxygen, even when they’re well loved. Sands of Time was always about pacing and flow, and that doesn’t always line up with where priorities seem to be.”
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