Beyond Good and Evil 2 has been in development for more than 18 years, and somebody at Ubisoft just signed up to write it.
Rik Godwin, a narrative director and lead writer at Ubisoft, posted on social media that he’s spent the past two months working on the game. Nobody leaked anything here. Godwin said he checked before posting, which suggests Ubisoft is fine with one more vague confirmation that the game exists.
And yes, you’re allowed to laugh a little.
Why a new hire matters more than another promise
Ubisoft has spent years making sideways references to this sequel. Back in June, Ubisoft brand director Loïc Gounon said in an interview that the game is still in active development. You’ve heard that line before, probably several times.
Godwin’s post is different because it shows staffing. Ubisoft is still putting more developers on the game, even with a development cycle that never seems to end and a company that’s in serious financial trouble.
The money problem is hard to ignore
A few months ago, Ubisoft reported a €1.3 billion ($1.48 billion) operating loss for its fiscal year ending in March 2026. Its stock price dropped sharply after the company started a major restructuring in January, splitting itself into five creative houses, each built around specific genres.
That same announcement canceled six games, the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake among them. Across the previous fiscal year, Ubisoft cut 1,200 jobs.
So the publisher killed a remake of one of its best-loved games and kept this one breathing. Make of that what you will.
A timeline that reads like a dare
Ubisoft first announced Beyond Good and Evil 2 in May 2008, with a trailer featuring the protagonist Jade and Pey’j, the pigman. After that came the long silence.
Ubisoft and director Michel Ancel (who created Beyond Good and Evil and Rayman) gave conflicting statements about whether the project was still moving. In 2016, Ancel confirmed it was on hold while his team made a new Rayman game.
Then, on June 12, 2017, Ubisoft showed a major new trailer at E3, one that leaned hard on interplanetary travel. Ancel left the studio in 2020. In the years since, Ubisoft has periodically said development continues without giving anyone anything concrete.
In 2022, the game passed Duke Nukem Forever’s record as the longest-in-development AAA game ever. That’s a record nobody wants to hold.
The strangest bet in the business
Look at the rest of the industry right now. Former heavyweights like Halo are being moved under new management because of underperformance. Studios are shrinking everywhere.
Against that backdrop, a struggling publisher is still funding an 18-plus-year development cycle for the sequel to a game that didn’t sell well the first time around. It’s the least sensible thing Ubisoft is doing, and somehow the most interesting.
Somewhere in that building, Godwin is two months into writing lines for Jade, a character players first met in a sequel trailer 18 years ago.
