Last week, Ubisoft canned the long-in-development Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake amid a raft of cancellations and delays which have come to serve as the starting bell for a bunch of organisational changes that are currently crystalising into job cuts. Now, actor Eman Ayaz has released a video in which she discusses having learned last week that three years worth of her work on an unnamed project had been tipped down the drain.
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The video doesn’t see Ayaz specify that the project she’s talking about is the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, with the actor claiming early on that she’s “still under NDA”. According to IGN and VGC, Ayaz has seperately reposted some comments from fans which suggest the Sands of Time remake is the project she’s referring to here.
“I’ve dedicated the last three years of my life to this project and spent those years getting to know the team, which has become like a family to me,” Ayaz said. I’ve watched it grow through countless stages of development and I’ve waited and waited for the day that it was finally going to be released and I could finally talk about it. And this week I found out through the internet that the project has been cancelled.”
According to the actor, she found out about the cancellation after her brother spotted an article about it. “I was just in total shock,” she recalled. “Just last month or two months ago, I had filmed marketing for this project. Everything had been running smoothly and that was the last that I had heard and we were all really looking forward to it being released this year.”
Ayaz claimed she turned down “other opportunities” while working on the project and opted to keep coming to work on it with a broken foot. Following the cancellation, the Canadian Pakistani actor has had to abandon plans to apply for a visa to work in the US and aim to land gigs there off the back of having the now-cancelled project on her resume.
In their statement about the Sands of Time remake’s cancellation, Ubisoft wrote that “while the project had real potential, we weren’t able to reach the level of quality you deserve, and continuing would have required more time and investment than we could responsibly commit”. The company also added that they “didn’t want to release something that fell short of what The Sands of Time represents”.
“Sadly, the entertainment industry is not really just about entertainment,” Ayaz said towards the end of her video. “It’s about guaranteeing a cash flow. And that means making decisions that treat people’s lives as collateral damage and art as disposable content. I’m not the only person that this decision affects, and it’s a really sad thing to see the aversion to risk in the entertainment industry.”
