Ubisoft's love for service games ruined the development of Splinter Cell: former employee shared about a canceled sequel
Since 2013, Ubisoft has not released any new Splinter Cell games, only limiting to crossovers and the Splinter Cell: Deathwatch animated series, which was released in October 2025. Even the remake of the first part, announced in 2021, never took shape and is highly likely to be canceled.
However, it has now become known that the French publisher did make an attempt to revive the franchise, but was hindered by the most unfortunate decision in Ubisoft's history.
What is known
Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier spoke with Nick Herman — a former employee of Ubisoft San Francisco. He shared that in 2017 a development team was working on creating an ambitious single-player game Splinter Cell. The authors intended to offer gamers an exciting spy story that would be a worthy continuation of the iconic series.
The work lasted several months and initially, the developers were full of enthusiasm, but it was exactly then, in 2017, that Ubisoft's management decided that the future lay exclusively with service games and started promoting this concept to all its divisions. Since Splinter Cell was conceived solely as a single-player game, it did not fit into the new realities of Ubisoft and was canceled.
This management decision greatly upset Nick Herman, who tried to save the project, but he did not succeed.
For the first six months, we came to work with excitement because we believed we were creating something truly amazing. And then you realize that everything that was dear to you... the company no longer needs. This is common in the gaming industry.
Well, now Ubisoft surely regrets that decision, and Herman, as part of the newly formed studio AdHoc, released the hit story game Dispatch, which became yet another confirmation that the judgments of the French publisher's managers were mistaken.
Source: Bloomberg
