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Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- arlattimore 8mo agoI loved Prince of Persia, bummed to hear the re-launch has been shelved.
- WillPostForFood 8mo agoJust last week it was revealed that it had gotten an ESRB rating (now removed). So it must have been pretty far along in development. https://web.archive.org/web/20260114063329/https://www.esrb.org/ratings/37363/prince-of-persia-the-sands-of-time-remake/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260114063329/https://www.esrb....
- indigodaddy 8mo agoWhat happens to all that content/work when this sort of thing happens? Just gone gone or?
- literallywho 8mo agoUsually gone or retooled for something else. Even just within the Prince of Persia series, they had a game called Prince of Persia: Assassins that was canceled and turned into Assassin's Creed. There was also a sequel to Prince of Persia 2008 in development that was cancelled and never showed up again. You can even find footage from both of these games online, but they will never see the light of day unless someone leaks them (which does happen sometimes).
- indigodaddy 8mo agoThanks
- cainxinth 8mo agoSands of Time still has one of the best time reversal mechanics in any game I’ve played despite being 20 years old.
- malfist 8mo agoIt looks like their business model is mostly just remakes and remasters now with these closures. Does the C suite really believe that they can just milk those IPs forever and never create anything new?
- pixl97 8mo ago> those IPs forever and never create anything new? By putting some loot boxes and mobile purchases out there. Yes.
- AdmiralAsshat 8mo agoGiven that the cancelled PoP title in question was supposed to be a remake of PoP: The Sands of Time, it would seem that not even remakes/remasters can save them now.
- maltyr 8mo agoThis is the business model for most of the large gaming companies at this point. Activision had three or four studios dedicated to Call of Duty leapfrogging each other to release one every year. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty) Their last (2022, pre-acquisition) annual reports literally spell that out. > For example, in 2022, revenues associated with our three franchises—Call of Duty, Warcraft, and Candy Crush —collectively accounted for approximately 79% of our net revenues—and a significantly higher percentage of our operating income. We expect that a relatively limited number of popular franchises will continue to produce a disproportionately high percentage of our revenues and profits. - https://investor.activision.com/annual-reports https://investor.activision.com/annual-reports
- jeffwask 8mo agoCoD is a different beast though. In 2021, PlayStation tracked that that 1 million players on their console only had CoD installed and played no other games. Most Ubi franchise aren't that type of game ouside Rainbow Six which has a lot of years on it now. Ubisoft games used to be varied and innovative and they boiled a dozen IP's down to the exact same open world slop with different coats of paint while sending loved unique titles like Splinter Cell to the graveyard. It's like the companies who have tried to be the next Destiny or WoW. Those games did not become what they were by copying predecessors but by innovating and creating something new and unique that engaged gamers. This is what killed Bioware. Decades of innovation, each game something new and different. Improvements on previous design, ne styles of game play... then it became let's just copy what we did last time and what everyone else is doing.
- vardump 8mo agoMy kids have been waiting for a Rayman sequel for over 10 years now. Is Rayman not profitable enough?
- grogenaut 8mo agoRayman legends came out in 2019 or are you referring to another title?
- deadbabe 8mo ago2019 was basically ten years ago.
- amarant 8mo agoPersonally I refer to 2025 as "the lost decade". I swear I was a teenager going into it, and now people tell me I'm nearly 40!?!??
- deadbabe 8mo agoCrazy that the 2020s are nearly over
- taskforcegemini 8mo ago+1, I feel exactly the same
- FractalParadigm 8mo agoYour dates are a little off - Rayman Legends released in 2013 and saw a remaster in 2017. Rayman Mini was released in 2019, but it's not exactly a main-franchise title...
- Handprint4469 8mo agothat depends. how much money do your kids have?
- cherry_tree 8mo ago>Ubisoft will now focus on developing open world adventure games - which let players freely navigate vast environments - and live service games which seek regular payments from players. Isn’t that what they’ve been doing for a decade that got them to today?
- grogenaut 8mo ago"we're going to cut all the other stuff and make assasins creed games and far cry, the stuff that we can leverage our studios on and make money"
- TulliusCicero 8mo agoIf it's obviously broke, don't fix it! The problem with reorgs can be that the same management that got you into this situation is the one trying to fix everything. Apparently, Ubisoft management only knows one trick.
- petsfed 8mo agoMy number 1 complaint with Ubi games is that they all feel the same. Sure, in this one you stab, and in that one you shoot, and in that one over there you stab AND shoot, but it's all fundamentally the same. You've got a drone or a bird or a droid to tag enemies for you, and there's a straightforward shopping-list style crafting mechanic. There's also some vehicle combat, but its very limited, and its pretty rare that you're part of a larger group of vehicles attacking together - at best its a group of enemy vehicles coming after you (and the comedy of errors of those enemy vehicles crashing into each other trying to get to you, because apparently they didn't turn on pathfinding while in "alert" mode...). The whole thing looks like its chasing the annual-release pattern of Call of Duty, and the major sports franchises.
- vips7L 8mo agoI discovered last night that my company's stock price is higher than Ubi's and we've lost 75% of our value over the last few years. Doesn't seem good.
- elromulous 8mo agoStock price by itself is meaningless. Instead what you want is market cap (number of shares x share price).
- lagniappe 8mo agoJust curious, why do you stick around on a sinking ship?
- vips7L 8mo agoFinding a job is hard and I'm picky about the technology I work in.
- lagniappe 8mo agoThanks for the reply. Wishing you luck, in either your company turning around or a new opportunity finding you.
- vips7L 8mo agoThanks :) I've been applying but it feels like yeeting my resume into the void. I'm also staff level and those roles are fewer to come by. I suspect that I will have to settle for a higher paying senior role, which may not be that bad.
- RobRivera 8mo agoMarket cap pls
- vpribish 8mo agothat's not how stock prices work. look at the market cap or the multiple of it over revenue / profit / employees / whatever comparable metric
- intunderflow 8mo agoStock down over 39% since this announcement, brutal. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBI.PA/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBI.PA/
- esalman 8mo ago40% is not earth-shattering when it closed at $6.73 yesterday.
- 0xffff2 8mo agoThe absolute value of one share doesn't really mean anything. No matter how you slice it, down 40% means that the company lost 40% of its value overnight. That's pretty Earth shattering for any company IMO.
- esalman 8mo agoIf it does not mean anything, why do day traders concentrate on sub $10 stocks and long term investors ignore them?
- donavanm 8mo agoDid you just answer your own question? Sure, the share price is a psychological element and, in conjunction with pre-fractional-ownership, it helps explain the prevalence of splits above $100/share. But no, the individual unit price doesnt affect true “value”, marketcap, or fundamentals like future discounted profit model.
- Pwntastic 8mo agodown 64% over the last year, and 95% over the past five. yikes
- adamrezich 8mo agoThis is a 23-year-old game we're talking about here. The design work was complete long before anyone working on this project was hired by Ubisoft, and proven in the form of a game that shipped several console generations ago. Ubisoft presumably still has all of the original art assets for reference. All that had to be done was to study the original game code, port it for modern systems, and then polish up the visuals some. Not a trivial amount of work by any means, but much, much easier than starting from scratch and making a game from nothing. This should've been a layup for any competent studio given SEVEN YEARS(!!!) to work on the project. That it wasn't, is undeniable evidence of a AAA game development competency crisis.
- jmyeet 8mo agoIt depends what you mean by "original". The very first Prince of Persia game came out in the early 90s. It's at least 35 years old. It was noteworthy as being one of the first games (if not the first) to have ragdoll physics for the movement of the player. It was a game of playing through 12 levels (IIRC) and if you died, you started over completely. I played it for 20 hours straight at one point and ended up beating it. I think it takes like 30-45 minutes for a full run through normally? I'm a bit fuzzy on this part. It was an amazing game. What you're talking about is the early 2000s "reboot" that launched a new franchise under the old name and really wasn't that similar to the original other than a setting of being loosely Persian/Arabic. But it wasn't a platform game in the same sense.
- tom_ 8mo agoThe article states it was a remake of The Sands of Time, so the early 2000s game. As the basis for the project it will count as the original in this case.
- adamrezich 8mo agoThe failed remake in question is for Sands of Time (2003–2004) rather than for the original Prince of Persia (1989)—though, judging by this catastrophe, the remake development team wouldn't have been able to remake the original game in seven years either!
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- tibbydudeza 8mo agoBeyond Good and Evil 2 is dead ?.
- Hamuko 8mo agoAlways was.
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoThe people that gave you that don’t make games anymore. Or they can’t. Or they’re not allowed. If it came out now, it was going to be filled with busy work, loot, achievements, collectible, just a ton of nonsense to get you to play longer and longer even after the game stopped being fun. Beyond good and evil 2 was never going to be the sequel that you wanted. The best it was going to be Space Assassin’s Creed. Be glad you were there for the original and got to experience it.
- cubefox 8mo agoYou mean: "Is Beyond Good and Evil 2 dead?" Apparently not: https://insider-gaming.com/exclusive-beyond-good-evil-2-survives-ubisofts-project-purge/ https://insider-gaming.com/exclusive-beyond-good-evil-2-surv...
- jeffwask 8mo agoWhen has it been truly alive, is it 10 or 15 years of development hell now?
- literallywho 8mo agoPretty sure it's been over 20 years. I actually wonder what makes Ubisoft so committed to the project. Even Michel Ancel himself left in 2020. I'd love to see those original 2008 builds of the game, they had to have made TONS of content over the years that just remains locked away on some file server forever.
- tibbydudeza 8mo agoEven Duke Nukem Forever came out eventually ;).
- tibbydudeza 8mo agoThey have this amazing engine - MMOGenerator - they change a few skins and boom you got a Far Cry or Assassins Creed game.
- TheJoeMan 8mo agoI dislike that an executive is quoted as blaming "rising development costs", essentially blaming the workers/salaries, with no rebuttal. This is especially suspect with the timing of closing an office that just unionized. It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages. And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the journalist because what are they to do, interview a laid-off worker at the business? I doubt someone would go on the record lambasting their former employer, but it would probably turn up the truths such as fraud or waste.
- jeffwask 8mo agoSame exec team that swept a shit load of sexual misconduct under the rug.
- SJC_Hacker 8mo ago> And there can't be a really fair counter-view by the journalist because what are they to do, interview a laid-off worker at the business? Umm, yes? Thats called journalism They don't have to name people if they can get independent verification from multiple sources (standard was 3, sometimes 2)
- djfdat 8mo agoMany times your severance comes along with a non-disparagement agreement. And typically the people being laid off don't really have the insight into the operational costs to serve as a counter-point to that argument. That's not to say the journalists shouldn't try. Having execs pushing their probably false or at least misdirecting narrative in order to control the optics without question or consequence means that they'll continue to operate dishonestly.
- miltonlost 8mo agoFor every worker asking for more wages, there's the executives and capitalist class (who doesn't work) demanding even larger increases for themselves. Media often don't ask "hey, maybe you don't need such exorbitant profit" because they are themselves then owned by capitalists who don't work and don't need such outsized wealth.
- jeffwask 8mo agoTheir announcement that they were doubling down on everything their customers hate was a choice. The Guillemot family is a cancer on gaming.
- ultra_nick 8mo agoA lot of game companies are really committed to building products that their customers hate these days. What happened to talking to your customers?
- Mountain_Skies 8mo agoThose customers are problematic so their preferences aren't considered.
- direwolf20 8mo agoZIRP happened and there was a whole decade when you didn't have to sell good products to make money and then we forgot how to sell good products to make money.
- jeffwask 8mo agoThis is why we are seeing a resurgence of Double A with games like Expedition 33 taking the limelight because art does not thrive under corporate control. I'm old enough to have seen this cycle of birth and death of studios a few times already. They start of making cool things, get acquired, get forced to make profitable things that aren't necessarily good, the talent that built the place fucks off, and you are left with a name and a factory of devs who have no agency, and the studio eventually dies.
- vkou 8mo agoIn business, your customers aren't the people who buy your product, they are the people who fund your company.
- hulitu 8mo agoSam Altman, is that you ? /s
- ytch 8mo agoThere is no income from customers for 3 to 4 years during developing. Therefore they face interfere from investors and banks first.
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- jmyeet 8mo agoI find almost all modern content producers to be a depressing business, fundamentally incompatible with being a large corporation. This includes movies, TV and video games. The problem is the large corporation wants to remove creativity from the process. They want a repeatable formula that they can scale and infinitely reproduce. The wet dream for the modern AAA studio is a "game" like FIFA that has annual releases and loot boxes to gamble on to get better pixels. Call of Duty and similar games are the next best because it's user-generated content ("UGC"). They still have to invest to create maps, which they don't like doing. But you still have micro-transactions for skins so that's good (for them). I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey a lot. Some people don't like it because it's too CRPG. That's why I liked it. They paid a lot of attention to the environment. I've heard of teachers using it to portray ancient Greece. They managed this even though it was a little formulaic. I suspect that any future AC releases will be even more formulaic. The one exception to this "large game studio = bad" rule had been Rockstar. The various GTA3 titles and GTA4 were widely renowned because of their social commentary and wit, as well as being groundbreaking (at the time) for open world games. But GTA5 was a turning point for me. Yes it was a sprawling, beautiful environment but the writing was complete ass. It had none of the intelligence and insight of earlier titles. The characters were awful. But Rockstar seemingly didn't care because they're discovered the GTA Online money faucet, something I don't care about at all. I really wonder if GTA6 will be beautiful but soulless. It coudl go either way. RDR2 was released after GTA5, after all. These big studios really do have a habit of killing successful franchises or simply sucking the life out of them. There are few bigger fumbles than the EA SimCity fiasco. I guess you can say Civilization has maintained... something. But honestly I haven't really felt compelled to play the franchise much since Civ4. I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.
- jeffwask 8mo agoThere are still a few studios fighting the good fight Rockstar, CDPR (they at least made up for their big mistake), Larian, FromSoft, Naughty Dog, Valve
- direwolf20 8mo agoDoes Valve even still make games?
- reactordev 8mo agoUbisoft is a cancer upon the entertainment industry.
- farceSpherule 8mo ago[dead]
- almosthere 8mo agoOlder companies lose that burn that drive the mission. Eventually it's just meetings on meetings on meetings. Many people leave to join small games startups now.
- sbuttgereit 8mo agoIt's interesting. I wonder how much large-company disfunction is derailing these things. Recently Hytale, a would-be Minecraft successor, released early access. That project started around a decade ago as something of an indie project, was purchased by Riot, then cancelled by Riot, then recently sold back to the original project people... who basically undid a lot of fruitless work done by Riot and... as I said... now released as early access. A well received early access as far as I can tell. I wonder why we don't see more indie games and new developers that are more able rising to challenge what look like dysfunctional incumbents? I'll be the first to admit that I don't know anything about that industry, but it seems like there's space to make progress for newcomers.
- servalan 8mo ago30+ years in AAA game dev and the dysfunction is pervasive at large companies. If the C-suite could visualize the diminishing returns and massive opportunity costs of their own mismanagement, they’d have no choice but to fire themselves and deploy their golden parachutes.
- hackable_sand 8mo agoWell, you kind of made the point. It takes time, and a healthy culture.
- this_user 8mo agoThe whole AAA video game industry has been struggling in recent years as oversupply, astronomical development costs, and competition from nimbler AA and indie studios have put a serious dent into their profits. And unlike EA or Activision, Ubisoft no longer has any reliable cash cow franchises, which puts them into precarious position. But the fact that their only answer to this is doubling down on the strategy that has stopped worked years ago does not bode well for them.
- tyleo 8mo agoIt isn’t just AA and indie. A lot of the play hours are soaked up by mega titles like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite before AA and indie even kick in. I’d say the low tier is just as impacted by this dynamic. Everyone else is fighting over a tiny slice of the pie.
- Surac 8mo agoUbisoft is a real thread to all people. I have no problems with them going down. my condulence to all workers loosing there jobs.
- amelius 8mo ago'Rising development costs' Why, we have AI now ...
- JohnMakin 8mo ago"Rising costs." BS. These same companies are also going around saying AI is gonna replace their workforce. Rockstar's been laying off like crazy the last few years, gee, what a shocker GTA VI keeps getting delayed. It's almost, almost like people are valuable and worth retaining.
- vazma 8mo agoI used to work at the Ubisoft studio in Sweden, and honestly, it’s sad to see this. That studio was full of amazing, talented people who built The Division—a game that brought in massive income for Ubisoft for years. The problems really started when Ubisoft headquarters began interfering more and more with the studio's decisions. Because of that management pressure, a lot of the top talent just decided to leave. Ubisoft leadership has made so many bad moves lately. They wasted huge amounts of money on NFT/crypto stuff that nobody wanted. Then they made that awful comment about how "gamers should get used to not owning their games." Even if that’s where the industry is heading, saying it out loud to your own customers is just crazy. It’s like they don't understand their own audience anymore.
- haunter 8mo agoJust one more open world game bro. I promise bro just one more open world game and it'll fix everything bro. Bro just one more open world game. Please just one more. One more open world game with micro transactions and we can fix this whole problem bro. Come on just give me one more open world game I promise bro. Bro please I just need one more game with micro transactions I need it. Come on bro aren't you a gamer?
- nathanaldensr 8mo agoI'm going to fire up Super Metroid on Snes9x later.
- platevoltage 8mo agoThis really sucks for the people affected, but hopefully a few dozen Team Cherries come out of this. (I don't think I pluralized that correctly)
- akimbostrawman 8mo agoWell deserved but little sad we don't get to see those slop games
- pjmlp 8mo agoWe are close to a 1983 kind of crash, it has never been easier to produce games, the amount of shovelware is non stopping, additionally with emulators and existing working hardware there are plenty of games to play since Pong. Graphics isn't everything, gameplay is. As such there are more games to play than most of us care about in our lifetimes still, and not everyone suffers from FOMO, thus it is unsustainable to keep producing games that require hours of investment in double digits, new hardware all the time, 60 euros on average, with a userbase that is generaly speaking stable (e.g. there is no exponential growth of new customers). Unfortunely MBAs don't get this, and the curve has to always go up, except it usually doesn't.
- hulitu 8mo ago> Graphics isn't everything, gameplay is. And they both suck. Geaphics is either too realstic or too of "small child" variety. Nothing in between. And gameplay: There is a lot of interference with the player: i want a shooter, not an RPG (wolfenstein). I want to build cities, not fight to collect stupid items (Anno 2205). And wait hours for the game to download and then, one per week, the same to update.
- j1elo 8mo agoMBAs only are capable of performing Excel-driven-Development. Or like I saw the other day on HN, en-sheet-ification. If the chart doesn't go up, then some execs who have never even played a game start to cry and design labor cuts so the numbers get makeup and start looking better.
- 293736729129 8mo ago"It's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game." - Philippe Tremblay, director of subscriptions at Ubisoft