Earlier this week, Ubisoft announced that it had cancelled the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, which was due to release later this year.
Ubisoft never shied away from its rocky development, as the backlash to the initial reveal led to a complete reboot of the game as the reins were handed to another studio entirely, but unfortunately, things didn’t go much smoother at Ubisoft Montreal.
“It’s very complicated,” Insider Gaming editor-in-chief Tom Henderson said. “Even to the point where I have internal communication messages [and] QA reports saying that the game is fine, and then I also have QA people who tested the game saying that it’s absolutely awful, so there’s a lot of miscommunication and some really bad stuff going on with the game.”
Henderson also alleges that developers working on the rumoured Black Flag remake were brought in to help, but that they were unable to get Sands of Time back on course. “From what I was told, they were kind of just stood there looking around because they [weren’t] being taken seriously and it all just kind of fell apart,” he explained.
While Ubisoft didn’t divulge why it cancelled Sands of Time, it did state that all six projects which were axed as part of the publisher’s “major reset” did not “meet the new enhanced quality” expectations, lining up with Henderson’s report.
The Sands Of Time Remake Was Reportedly Supposed To Launch Early January
Henderson explained earlier in the podcast that the marketing and backend materials he was privy to indicated that Sands of Time was scheduled to release on January 16 (something he reported last year), with the Black Flag remake set to follow a few months later on March 19. “During the December period, there was a trailer for the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake done,” he claimed. “That was meant to come out some time around Christmas to announce the January 16 release date”.
Ubisoft was also victim to a breach in December, which Henderson claims “hasn’t been fixed and is far more significant than what is being said”.
The reason that didn’t happen is allegedly because of miscommunication between leadership and upper management, with information not being relayed back to developers. But it wasn’t cancelled at first. Originally, it was pushed back to March; then, after an inspection, Ubisoft “determined that it simply wasn’t good enough to launch” and would have likely required upward of 50 million Euros to match its expectations.
- Released
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2026
- ESRB
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m
- Developer(s)
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Ubisoft Montreal
- Engine
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Jade
