It's been five years since the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake first leaked out of the Russian Uplay store, and while plenty has happened since then, one thing that definitely has not happened is the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake. It's basically Skull and Bones redux: Repeated delays, a studio change, a whole-ass reboot, more delays, more studios, and most recently a very funny social media mishap that prompted a promise that Ubisoft is indeed still working on the game, "behind the scenes."
I would be remiss if I didn't also point out that it's been four years since Ubisoft announced a full remake of the original Splinter Cell, which has somehow made even less progress: When last we checked, Ubisoft celebrated 10 years of viciously trolling Splinter Cell fans by mixing up images of Sam Fisher.
Hope dies hard, though, and so my ears perked up when both games got a mention during the Q&A portion of Ubisoft's recent Annual General Meeting. Nothing concrete about either game was announced—that's not really what AGMs are for—but in terms of maybe this time, Prince of Persia fans definitely came out on top.
In response to a question about Tencent's investment into Ubisoft and the new spinoff entity the two are now launching, chief financial officer Frederick Duguet explained in very general terms how the cash will be spread around, including that some of the money will go back to Ubisoft to be used "selectively" for future development of other brands, and to "boost our live games."
"As you know, we've got some iconic brand names in our catalog that we can either activate or reactivate with little investment," Duguet said. "This goes to the remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is going to be released very soon, or even Splinter Cell later on."
The most recently provided release target for the Sands of Time Remake was sometime in Ubisoft's 2026 fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2026. That's now eight months away, which I don't think qualifies as "very soon," although relative to how things have gone so far? Yeah, maybe.
More likely, though, is that Ubisoft is targeting (or at least really hoping for) a release for the holiday 2025 season, which puts it within the next five months, and considerably less if we assume Ubi doesn't want to drop it three days before Christmas.
I can't say that window feels reasonably solid, but it feels relatively solid, and certainly several big steps ahead of poor ol' Splinter Cell, which seemingly remains trapped in development limbo. Why Duguet would even bring it up like this is beyond me, except that maybe PC Gamer's Fraser Brown was right all along when he wrote that Ubisoft is just trolling us for weird kicks. That was five years ago, too.
