Nine months after Ubisoft pulled the plug on it, the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake has found the most unlikely lifeline imaginable, because one fan is now offering to pay for it. In an open letter posted on X on October 29, user @NachoRB10 put more than €5 million on the table to help restart development on the cancelled project, and perhaps the most surprising part is that the offer asks for almost nothing in return.
The letter, which quickly made its way to the Prince of Persia community on Reddit, goes out of its way to spell out what the fan does not want. There is no request for a financial return, no claim on a share of sales revenue, no stake in the intellectual property and no demand for any say over the game’s creative direction. Instead, the author leaves the question of whether to resume work entirely with Ubisoft, and simply asks the company to share a point of contact or direct them to the right department so that a formal proposal can be submitted.
€5 million buys a feasibility check, at best
Before anyone starts picturing a finished remake landing on store shelves next year, it helps to read the fine print, since the author is careful not to oversell the gesture. The sum is not presented as the full cost of completing the game; rather, it is framed as an initial budget that would allow Ubisoft to evaluate whether resuming development is feasible at all, with any money changing hands only after a formal agreement and a proper viability assessment, and on terms that Ubisoft itself would set.
That framing is smarter than it might first appear, because a vague promise to “fund the game” would have been easy to wave away, whereas an offer to underwrite a feasibility study gives Ubisoft something small, specific and low-risk to consider. Even so, the distance between a feasibility budget and a shippable AAA remake is enormous, and that distance is exactly where this story starts to get complicated.
Ubisoft killed it in January’s company reset
The remake was officially killed on January 21, 2026, when Ubisoft unveiled a sweeping company reset that split its studios into five genre-focused “Creative Houses” and trimmed its development pipeline hard. Six games were cancelled outright, although The Sands of Time remake was the only one Ubisoft named publicly, with the rest made up of four unannounced projects, three of them new IPs, and a mobile title. Furthermore, seven other games were delayed, and the publisher confirmed the closure of its studios in Stockholm and Halifax as part of the same overhaul.
On the same day, the development team explained the decision in an official statement to the community, opening with a blunt “We know this is deeply disappointing.” According to the team, the project had potential but had not reached the level of quality that fans expected, and getting it there would have demanded more time and investment than the company could responsibly commit. Ubisoft never put a figure on that additional cost; however, the team was quick to stress that walking away from this remake did not mean walking away from the franchise.
Six years and not one release date kept
To understand why a fan would feel compelled to write such a cheque, it helps to remember just how long this game was dangled in front of players. Ubisoft first revealed the remake at its Ubisoft Forward showcase in September 2020, with Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai leading development and a release date of January 21, 2021, at a $39.99 price point. The reveal trailer below, however, drew heavy criticism for its visuals, and in December 2020 the launch slipped to March 18, 2021, before Ubisoft delayed the game indefinitely that February.
In May 2022, the project moved to Ubisoft Montreal, the studio that made the 2003 original, and by November of that year Ubisoft was cancelling and refunding pre-orders while insisting the game itself had not been cancelled. Montreal effectively went back to the drawing board, and it was not until November 2023, timed with the original game’s 20th anniversary, that the team announced the remake had passed an important internal milestone. Ubisoft Toronto then joined the effort in mid-2024, when a short teaser set a release window before the end of Ubisoft’s 2025-26 fiscal year in March 2026, which makes the cancellation all the more painful given that it arrived barely two months before that window closed.
Can €5 million really change Ubisoft’s mind?
Realistically, the money alone is unlikely to move Ubisoft, and the reasons have far more to do with how modern AAA development works than with the fan’s generosity. A full remake built to current-generation standards typically costs many times this amount, so €5 million would cover only a fraction of what it would take to finish the job, even if Ubisoft could salvage a large share of the work Montreal and Toronto had already completed. Moreover, the team’s own statement made it clear that money was only part of the problem, since it openly admitted the game had not hit its quality bar, and no outside cheque can buy back the months or years needed to close that gap.
There is also the question of who is actually making the offer. The author remains anonymous, which means neither their identity nor their access to the funds has been verified, and at the moment nobody outside the letter can confirm that the €5 million really exists. In practice, a publicly listed publisher like Ubisoft would also need to weigh serious legal, accounting and reputational questions before accepting money from a private individual, and Prince of Persia adds an extra wrinkle because Ubisoft’s own press materials have historically listed the name as a trademark of series creator Jordan Mechner, used under licence. As of publication, Ubisoft has not publicly responded to the letter.
That said, fan money has rescued a game before, although never quite like this. Shenmue III exists largely because backers pledged around $6.3 million on Kickstarter in 2015, yet that campaign was fronted by series creator Yu Suzuki, unveiled on Sony’s E3 stage and backed by a licence from Sega from day one. A single anonymous benefactor writing to a publisher that has already closed the book on a project is a very different proposition, and the comparison mostly underlines how much official backing such rescues usually need.
The fans have not let go
Whatever comes of the letter, it lands in a community that has refused to accept the cancellation quietly. Within days of the January announcement, fans had rallied behind a #SavePrinceOfPersia petition, and in April 2026 a group calling itself Prince of Persia Universe announced a large-scale fan mod for the original game, openly recruiting 3D artists to give the 2003 classic the modern makeover Ubisoft never delivered. Meanwhile, the open letter is now circulating through those same circles, with fans urging one another to share it in the hope that the noise eventually reaches someone at Ubisoft with the authority to reply.
That persistence says a lot about where the series stands, especially given Ubisoft’s uneven handling of the franchise in recent years. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown won over critics in 2024, yet its team at Ubisoft Montpellier was split up later that year amid reports that sales had fallen short of expectations, while Evil Empire’s The Rogue Prince of Persia left early access in August 2025 and has since passed one million players. Neither of those games, though, carries the weight of The Sands of Time, which remains the entry that defined the Prince for an entire generation, and that is precisely why the remake’s failure to ship still stings six years after its first trailer.
A long shot that still puts Ubisoft on the spot
The realistic expectation is that Ubisoft will either stay silent or politely decline, since reopening a cancelled project would mean reversing a decision it made in front of investors less than a year ago. Even so, the letter has already achieved something that petitions and hashtags rarely manage, because it has put an actual number on fan demand for a game that its own publisher could not justify finishing.
If Ubisoft ever returns to The Sands of Time, whether through one of its new Creative Houses or as a smaller, more modest remaster, it now knows that at least one player was prepared to put seven figures behind the idea, and we will update this story if the publisher responds.
