Ubisoft have just cancelled the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake. Because of course they have. Because Ubisoft, like every big corporation in the video games industry, loves doing three things: laying off employees, cancelling games, and taking a massive dump on my childhood.  

The Prince of Persia trilogy is one of the greatest gaming trilogies of all time. These games were such a massive part of my upbringing with the PlayStation 2. I loved their worlds, atmosphere, and characters. The wall-running mechanic is still, to this day, one of the most iconic things in video games. I love these games to bits. I even loved the weird reboot from 2008, where you couldn’t die, and the prince sounded like he was just some dude out of downtown L.A. I guess they couldn’t find a brown voice actor, so they just brought in the guy who voiced every nondescript protagonist during the mid-2000s—love you, Nolan North, but you could’ve at least appropriated a Middle Eastern accent; I would’ve let it slide.

So, when Ubisoft announced in the fall of 2020 that they were working on a remake for The Sands of Time, I was incredibly excited. It didn’t matter that the trailer they showed didn’t look the best; it was The Sands of Time. Then, fast-forward a couple of years, and Ubisoft provided an update stating that the development of the remake would be taken over by Ubisoft Montreal. Okay, little hiccup, but it’s probably for the best. Stuff like this happens all the time; no need to worry…right? 

Wrong. As a part of a “restructure,” Ubisoft have announced that they will be shuttering two studios and cancelling six games, The Sands of Time remake being one of them. As Tom Phillips from IGN reports, “Three of the cancelled games were new IPs, while one was a mobile game. Ubisoft’s core focus going forward, the company has said, will be on open-world games and live services.” *sighs* Apparently, Beyond Good and Evil is not a part of these cancelled projects, but I’ll believe it when I see it. 

It sucks, even though people seem to want more Prince of Persia, as evidenced by The Lost Crown—a 2D metroidvania—selling more than a million copies, it’s not enough for Ubisoft, apparently. But hey, they’re a multi-billion-dollar corporation, I’m sure they know what they’re doing—