Ubisoft still says the Sands of Time remake hasn't been cancelled, but preorders have been refunded
Ubisoft has once again affirmed that the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake has not been cancelled. The company is so tired of people asking about it that it's created an entire FAQ that everyone can refer to if and when they have questions or doubts.
It's understandable that people would wonder about the state of the Sands of Time remake, a game that has, somewhat ironically, taken a while to finish. Though Ubisoft did not cite the Covid-19 pandemic as a reason for the game's delay, the pandemic has been an understandable source of disruption in the games industry, with 44 percent of developers blaming it for delays in 2021.
In Ubisoft's case, The Sands of Time was announced in 2020 with a 2021 release date but has been delayed multiple times since then, and after promoting the remake as the first project to be led by Ubisoft's studios in India, it was transferred to Ubisoft Montreal in 2022. The most recent delay, in June, pushed the game out of Ubisoft's 2023 fiscal year and left it without any kind of release target.
That's still where things stand, according to the FAQ, which says that "a new release date has not been set." It also notes that there are currently no plans to remake any other games in the Prince of Persia series, which debuted as a rotoscoped platformer in 1989. That's understandable too, given the grief Ubisoft seems to be having getting this one out the door.
Interestingly, one thing has changed: In the June delay announcement, Ubisoft said fans who had preordered the game could contact their retailers to cancel if they didn't want to wait for it; in this new FAQ, it said that because The Sands of Time remake does not currently have a release date, existing preorders have been automatically cancelled and refunded. "Pre-orders may reopen once a new release date for the game has been announced," Ubisoft added.
Ubisoft isn't the only publisher to auto-refund preorders because of delays—something similar recently happened with Stalker 2—but Ubisoft does seem to have unique struggles with high-profile delays. In March it delayed The Settlers RTS, in July it did the same with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, in September—less than two months before release—it mashed the brakes on Skull and Bones, and Beyond Good and Evil 2 recently surpassed Duke Nukem Forever's all-time videogame vaporware record.