An actress who appeared to work on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’s now cancelled PS5 remake said she found out about the situation through WhatsApp.
In a new YouTube video, Eman Ayaz talks at length about the “grief” she’s facing following the scrapping of a project she worked on for three years. She never explicitly mentions the Ubisoft game due to an ongoing NDA, but it’s pretty obvious what she’s talking about.
While she acknowledges her disappointment does not compare to the hardships many in the world are facing, she’s honest about her situation and how much she’s been hurt by the cancellation.
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At one point she reveals that she filmed marketing for the project less than two months ago, which would align with the idea that the game was almost finished. As many of you know, there had been rumours it’d release this month, in January 2026.
She said:
“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. 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. My brother reached out to me on WhatsApp and sent a text asking if I was okay. And I was like, 'Yeah, I'm okay. Why wouldn't it be okay?’ and he sends me a link to an article. That's where I read that it has been shelved forever.”
In Ubisoft’s defence, the cancellation probably came as a surprise to the entire team, so it’s possible no one had a chance to contact Ayaz before the news broke. Indeed, she points out that from her perspective everything had been “running smoothly” and the game was coming “this year”.
This is a particularly difficult situation for Ayaz, because it’s clear she considers this her big breakout project.
She explained:
“I can't stress enough how much I had planned my life around the release of this project. I had even reached out to entertainment lawyers to obtain an O-1 visa and try to work in the States once this project came out, and I had enough publicity from all that. But because the project has been cancelled and I can't publicly attach my name to it, that is no longer an option.”
To be fair, the video’s not mopey in the slightest: Ayaz is disappointed but defiant – she acknowledges that situations like this can occur in the entertainment industry, and she notes that she intends to keep moving forwards.
It does raise questions about just what went wrong here, though: if the game was almost finished, after years of development, why not just release it and recoup some of its presumably significant investment?
It’s alarming to think Ubisoft couldn’t complete a remake of a PS2 game, and it’s not like the clamour from fans for this project is just going to go away.