Ubisoft has cancelled remakes, culled new IP, and shuttered studios, yet Beyond Good & Evil 2 keeps surviving. Here is what the publisher is now saying about its gigantic open world, why it remains a priority after 17 years of development, and what that reveals about Ubisoft’s long‑term open‑world strategy.
Beyond Good & Evil 2 should not exist anymore.
Ubisoft has just cancelled a new wave of projects, including its long‑struggling Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake, while closing studios and speaking openly about a “major reset” of how it spends money. Yet once again, reports from Insider Gaming and follow‑up coverage from outlets like Kotaku, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Push Square all converge on the same point: Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in active development and “remains a priority” for the publisher.
After more than 17 years of stop‑start production, leadership changes, and a budget reportedly north of $500 million, that makes Beyond Good & Evil 2 one of the strangest survivors of Ubisoft’s ongoing restructuring. It is not just another game that refuses to die, it is a clue to how Ubisoft now thinks about open worlds.
A survivor of multiple purges
The latest round of cancellations at Ubisoft was not small. Six games were scrapped, four of them unannounced, and the Sands of Time remake that once headlined Ubisoft’s slate was formally put down. This followed earlier cuts and delays across the company as it tries to focus on fewer, bigger bets.
On paper, Beyond Good & Evil 2 should have been the easiest target. It has been in some form of development since its first reveal back in 2008, vanished for almost a decade, then re‑emerged in 2017 as a wildly ambitious online space‑pirate prequel. Since then it has only rarely resurfaced, mostly through hiring sprees, leadership reshuffles, and quiet reassurances that it is still happening.
Yet when this latest purge hit, Insider Gaming reported that Beyond Good & Evil 2 had survived again. Ubisoft then went on record in statements echoed by Kotaku, Eurogamer, and others, saying that Beyond Good & Evil 2 “remains a priority for us in the context of our strategy centered around Open World Adventures.”
In a moment where almost everything at Ubisoft is on the chopping block, the fact that Beyond Good & Evil 2 is repeatedly being pulled out of the fire is telling.
Ubisoft’s new favorite phrase: “Open World Adventures”
Across these statements the wording is unusually consistent. Ubisoft is not just saying Beyond Good & Evil 2 is important, it is saying it is important because it fits a new strategic label: Open World Adventures.
That might sound like generic PR, but it is a deliberate repositioning of what used to be described simply as “AAA live service” or “big franchises.” Ubisoft wants to narrow its focus to games that combine large open‑world structures with long‑tail engagement, and then build its portfolio around a handful of pillars that fit that template.
Assassin’s Creed already sits at the center of that plan. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws slot into the same category. Watch Dogs is dormant, Far Cry’s future looks less certain, and the Prince of Persia remake being cut suggests Ubisoft is skeptical of big budget linear revivals.
In that context, keeping Beyond Good & Evil 2 alive is less about nostalgia and more about diversification within a single, very specific genre. It is an attempt to have at least one open‑world pillar that does not look or play like Assassin’s Creed.
A “unique proposition” in a crowded open‑world market
Eurogamer’s reporting highlighted how Ubisoft internally describes Beyond Good & Evil 2 as a “unique proposition in the open world adventure market.” That uniqueness has a few clear layers.
First is the setting. Rather than a grounded historical environment or a familiar licensed universe, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is set in System 3, a colonized solar system in the 24th century where megacorps, hybrid species, and Old Earth cultures all collide. It is designed as a multicultural space opera where street markets, orbital slums, and massive capital ships overlap.
Second is the scope. Beyond Good & Evil 2 is pitched as a seamless solar‑system‑scale playground. Players start as a small‑time pirate and aim to rise to legendary captain, recruiting crew, acquiring ships, and jumping freely from city streets to orbit to deep space without traditional loading screens. Co‑op is central and Ubisoft’s own materials keep stressing “massive seamless online environment” rather than a contained single‑player world.
Finally there is the tone. Compared to the grounded seriousness of Assassin’s Creed or the gritty blockbuster style of Star Wars Outlaws, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is weirder and more expressive, closer to an anime flavored pirate saga than a prestige TV drama. Ubisoft has rarely had a chance to build a persistent open world around that kind of energy.
Taken together, those traits help explain why Ubisoft insists the game still “fits with our strategy of focusing on Open World Adventures.” It is not just another big map, it is a prototype for a different flavor of open world that might give the company room to maneuver beyond history and Hollywood licenses.
Too expensive to cancel, too big to ship small
The other, less romantic explanation is cost.
Insider Gaming’s sources estimate that Beyond Good & Evil 2 has already consumed more than $500 million. Even allowing for some margin of error, that would put it in the same league as the most expensive games ever produced. This for a project that has not shown public gameplay in years and still has no release window.
Sunk cost should not dictate future decisions, but in practice it often does. To write Beyond Good & Evil 2 off now would be to take a giant financial hit on a game that has already survived multiple course corrections and executive interventions. It would also mean publicly conceding that one of Ubisoft’s most ambitious open‑world experiments simply could not be finished.
There is also the question of scale. The current incarnation of Beyond Good & Evil 2 was sold on stage as a near science‑fiction sandbox where you could zoom from alleyway to atmosphere to outer space, crew a custom ship with friends, and leave your mark on a living system of planets and moons. That fantasy is hard to shrink without rewriting the entire pitch.
If Ubisoft cuts scope too visibly, the game risks becoming just another open‑world action title with some space travel bolted on, which would undermine the whole “unique proposition” argument. If it keeps the original scope, the tech, content load, and live service expectations remain enormous.
In other words, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is now sitting in a dangerous middle ground. It is too expensive to vanish quietly, but still too large and unwieldy to ship cheaply or quickly.
What Ubisoft is actually saying about the game now
Because Ubisoft has stopped putting Beyond Good & Evil 2 on big public stages, the only real windows into its current state come from cautious corporate statements.
Recent comments shared with Kotaku, Eurogamer and others hit a few consistent beats:
The game is “still in active development,” which implies it is not merely in maintenance or preproduction. Ubisoft has continued to reshuffle teams onto it and has assigned new senior creative leadership over the past few years, suggesting the design is still being actively iterated.
It “remains a priority,” but specifically “in the context of our strategy centered around Open World Adventures.” Priority here does not mean it is the next game out the door. It means leadership sees it as part of the long term identity of the company’s portfolio. In that sense Beyond Good & Evil 2 is being treated more like a strategic asset than a simple sequel.
Ubisoft also keeps framing it as a prequel that broadens the universe rather than a direct continuation of Jade’s story. That gives the team more freedom to craft a new cast and structure that fits a modern open‑world template while still being able to hook into nostalgia for the cult classic original.
None of these statements provide a release target. Instead they are designed to answer the only question people keep asking: is this thing dead yet. For now the official answer is still no.
A test case for Ubisoft’s post reorganization future
Ubisoft’s recent structural reset is widely interpreted as an attempt to become more disciplined after years of spreading itself thin across too many similar games. The publisher wants cleaner bets, clearer pipelines, and less risk of multi year drift.
In that sense Beyond Good & Evil 2 is both an outlier and a warning.
Internally, it is a live example of what happens when an open‑world project is allowed to evolve without hard limits for more than a decade. Staff turnover, technology shifts, changes in hardware generations, and corporate strategy pivots have all passed through this project while it tried to remain relevant.
At the same time, if Ubisoft can actually ship something coherent out of Beyond Good & Evil 2, it becomes proof that the new Open World Adventures focus can support more experimental universes and structures than just Assassin’s Creed reskins. It would show investors and players that Ubisoft’s long term plan is not only licensed worlds and historical tourism.
That tension is part of why the company keeps threading the needle instead of cancelling the game outright. Killing it would make sense for short term cleanup, but finishing it could be symbolically useful for a publisher trying to argue that its restructured pipeline can still produce ambitious new worlds.
What Beyond Good & Evil 2 signals about Ubisoft’s open world strategy
Step back from the drama around this specific game and a few broader signals emerge about how Ubisoft views open worlds going forward.
The first is consolidation. Ubisoft is comfortable culling entire projects and even studios, but it is reluctant to walk away from very large, long running open worlds that still have theoretical franchise potential. Open worlds are no longer just one category among many for the publisher, they are the core business.
The second is diversification within that core. Assassin’s Creed, Star Wars Outlaws, Avatar and Beyond Good & Evil 2 all represent slightly different flavors of the same fundamental idea: expansive maps, systemic exploration, progression heavy characters, and live service style updates. Ubisoft’s bet is that having several distinct settings and tones built on broadly compatible tech and pipelines will be cheaper than supporting a dozen unrelated series.
The third is long horizon thinking. By keeping Beyond Good & Evil 2 alive despite its brutal timeline, Ubisoft is signaling that it is prepared to nurture open world projects across multiple hardware cycles if it believes the eventual result can anchor a franchise or shared universe. That is a very different posture from the era when mid budget experiments could live and die in a single generation.
None of this guarantees that Beyond Good & Evil 2 will ever reach players, let alone live up to the legend it has accidentally created for itself. What it does mean is that the game has become more than a sequel. It is a test of Ubisoft’s capacity to deliver on its own idea of what an Open World Adventure should be.
If it ships and finds an audience, it will validate the strategy that kept it alive through multiple purges. If it quietly disappears, it will stand as a monument to just how risky and unstable mega scale open worlds can be, even for one of the companies that helped define the genre.
Until that verdict arrives, Beyond Good & Evil 2 will keep sitting where it has for years now: somewhere between cautionary tale and cornerstone of Ubisoft’s future.