Hey, remember how prior to 2018’s E3 some of us clung to the irrational hope that the new Splinter Cell game would be announced? Good times. Sad it didn’t happen, but still. Well now we finally know a bit more about the fate of the series.

The answer is to why is, well, pretty mundane as Ubisoft themselves defined it as “fight for resources”, in their interview with Game Informer.

I love Splinter Cell. I love Prince of Persia. I can’t disclose any information at this time, but I can say we are fighting for resources. It’s not a question of will, it’s a question of means.

Now this of course begs several questions. Why can’t people at Ubisoft decide themselves to allocate resources into a new Splinter Cell game, if they want to do that? Are these not their resources? These questions are of course academic, it’s understandable that the higher ups, maybe a bit blinded by the prospect of releasing Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and multiplayer Tom Clancy’s games year by year, may want to, you know, just keep doing that.

Although it’s interesting that the huge amounts of money they’re making on these games don’t make their way back into the company as an investment to make the games they want to make. That’s kind of the line that we were told for a while now, isn’t it? That companies need to make money, so they can make creative, artistically bold products?

Then again, maybe I’m giving them too little credit, they are working on Beyond Good and Evil -1 and Pirate Simulator simultaneously, so they very well might be starved for resources.

In the interview, Serge Hascoet also went into a bit more detail about the future of another franchise, Prince of Persia, which unassumingly ended after releasing a pretty good game. He also talked about their multiplayer ambitions for Assassin’s Creed and perhaps a new narrative direction, of doing away with cutscenes.

A lot of exciting stuff, the prospect of evolving Ubi is an interesting one, because their formula is really starting to be get stale. Then again the changes they talked about don’t really involve not doing the things which we’ve come to think of as “the Ubisoft formula” so how naive I’m being right now, only time will tell.