Michel Ancel declared that Ubisoft’s cancellation of the PlayStation exclusive Wild game was a real scandal.
Ubisoft’s survival game exclusive to PlayStation Wildwas announced with great excitement in 2014. However, the cancellation of the project and the chaos in management processes led to harsh criticism from former Ubisoft designer Michel Ancel. Ancel called this a “real scandal”, claiming that the game was “literally crushed” by the Ubisoft Paris team.
The Unfortunate Story of Ubisoft’s Canceled Game Wild
As a PS4-specific project, Wild was being developed by Ancel’s newly founded independent developer Wild Sheep Studio, with the support of Sony Interactive Entertainment. The game, which had a promising playable version until 2018, lost time during its upgrade to PS5. On top of that, management changes at Sony led to the project being stopped. During this process, Ubisoft made an offer to take over the game, and despite Sony’s offer to increase the budget, this offer was rejected due to existing contracts with Ubisoft.
Ancel claims that after Ubisoft took over the game, he handed the project over to the chaotic Paris editorial team, which led to the game’s demise. He also states that the problems grew when Tommy François, one of the Ubisoft executives at the time, took over the project. François later left the company due to sexual harassment allegations.
In an interview with Superpouvoir, Ancel stated that the Ubisoft Paris team absolutely crushed the project:
“We had a playable version in 2018, but the project was ruined by a team that imposed all kinds of changes after Ubisoft took over. These people hadn’t even played the game. After two years of needless toggling, Wild was canceled with the excuse that it didn’t match the original vision. This is literally A scandal.”
Michel Ancel announced that the difficulties he experienced in both the Wild and Beyond Good & Evil 2 projects caused him to leave the industry in 2020. Stating that he experienced serious burnout at the end of 2019, Ancel said, “My family life was very affected by this situation and I had no strength left to continue in the gaming industry due to mismanagement of my energy.”
Ancel added that they created playable demo videos for both projects in 2018 and that he would be happy to share these videos.
Wild’s cancellation continues to be cited as an example of managerial failure in the gaming industry. Although the project ended without meeting the expectations of the players, it managed to leave its mark in the gaming world with Michel Ancel’s other works in the sector.