There will always be tales within the gaming industry that seem “too weird” to be true, and yet, sometimes, they absolutely are. One of those stories coming into bloom is the numerous failures of Ubisoft in past years and how they are straight-up considering being bought out by Tencent, which could lead to many more potential failures in the future. However, one of the company’s former designers, Michael Ancel, brought up another failure of its past. He had created an indie studio that was meant to make a unique survival game called Wild back in 2014. The project was to be published by Sony eventually for the PS4, but it never got done.
He chatted with Superpouvior and revealed that once Ubisoft came in and got its hooks into it, they “crushed” the game in the worst way.
“In 2018, we had a very nice playable version, but we took a long time to upgrade the game to PS5, which slowed down production. On Sony’s side, there were major management changes and the game was stopped. Ubisoft offered to take it over, and shortly afterwards Sony decided to get it back, even offering to double our budgets. Unfortunately, contracts with Ubisoft were well advanced and we turned down Sony’s offer. What a shame.”
The Paris branch of the company took over production, which was apparently “in chaos” at the time, and Ancel’s game was now in the hands of another leader, which screwed things up even more:
“I was no longer there to defend the game, which was literally crushed by people in this department who were asking for all sorts of changes without actually playing the game. A real scandal. After two years of wandering, the game was abandoned on the pretext that it no longer corresponded to the initial game. It’s important to understand that, at the time, the editorial department was in the midst of an explosion following the internal affairs surrounding Tommy François, who, incidentally, was in charge of Wild.”
There’s plenty to unpack here, not the least of which was that the Paris branch was clearly not in any place to handle a game, and yet, it was told to, and it led to a game being so far from what it was supposed to be that it got canceled. Furthermore, leadership decisions backfiring is a common trend in today’s version of the publisher, which is why so many are wondering what its fate will be.
