Failure of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake Caused by Management Incompetence
We learned what caused the failure of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake and forced the project to be taken away from Ubisoft's division located in India.
Few games in recent years have had such a bumpy development cycle as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake. The project kept slipping until it was finally taken away from Ubisoft's Indian branch and handed over to Ubisoft Montreal. Now we found out what led to this situation.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake - what went wrong
The source of the information is an analyst specializing in the Indian game market Rishi Alwani.
- Alwani claims, the game's developmenn cycle was plagued with big problems from the beginning.
- Indian teams did not receive most of the necessary documentation from the work on the original from 2003. Because of this, the developers had to create everything practically from scratch.
- The use of the Anvil engine was also a big problem. The management forced the developers to take many elements from Assassin's Creed Origins. Even the animations were based on those developed for the main character of that game, Bayek. This warrior had much more buff physique than prince of Persia and that's why on the first videos the animations looked so poor.
- The director of the game had virtually no experience in video game development.
- An important role in the whole disaster was played by the head of Ubisoft India - Jean-Philippe Pieuchot. He wanted to transform the local branch of the company into a AAA game factory. However, he did not have the necessary knowledge and skills to realize these ambitions.
- Ubisoft headquarters did not supervise the project at all in its early stages. They became interested in it only after the bad reception of the first videos.
We also learned from the article that the game was not immediately handed over to Ubisoft Montreal. The team at Electric Square, which specializes in helping other teams, took over first. Its task was to finish the project in a short time, but when it turned out to be impossible in the deadline required by the publisher, the game was moved to the Montreal branch of the company.
The aftermath of a disaster
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake was supposed to show that India are ready to create AAA games. However, as a result of all these mistakes, the project had no chance to come to fruition.
- Jean-Philippe Pieuchot was transferred to the Ukrainian branch of Ubisoft.
- The publisher's remake teams in Mumbai and Pune have gone back to helping the company's other teams instead of developing their own games.
- The Mumbai branch's days may be numbered. Rishi Alwani believes that it will most likely be disbanded as soon as the lease for the team's offices runs out.
- To make matters worse, many talented developers left Ubisoft's Indian operations. Some of them moved to other companies, while others started their own studios.
The project was in such poor condition that Ubisoft Montreal will probably have to start from scratch. It's hard to imagine that it would be possible to meet fan expectations any other way.
