Ubisoft cancels sci-fi game Pioneer, which was technically never announced

Pour one out

Rest in peace, Pioneer; we hardly knew ye.

Ubisoft has canceled an open-universe sci-fi exploration game called Pioneer. Former Ubisoft director Alex Hutchinson (who’s now at Typhoon Studios) confirmed on Twitter that the project is dead.

Games get canceled all the time. What’s crazy about this one is that it was never officially revealed by Ubisoft. Watch Dogs 2 had a mission where the objective was to break into a video game studio, steal a top secret trailer, and then sell it to the games press. The trailer is the video that’s embedded above, for a game called Pioneer.

However, Kotaku discovered that Pioneer was a real project that was in development. In 2016 (when Watch Dogs 2 released), it was already in trouble. Ubisoft had reportedly changed Pioneer‘s leadership team around and reworked some core concepts. Once on track for a 2017 reveal, Ubisoft pushed that back because it wasn’t ready to show. At the time, Ubisoft wouldn’t comment on this meta game that was evidently also a very real game.

Now it’s dead. It’ll live on in the Watch Dogs 2 universe, but it’s scrapped in our real-world universe. That’s how a game that was technically never announced can be canceled in a semi-high-profile way.

@jasonschreier [Twitter]