While Ubisoft may have some artistic attachment to the game, there are also very real financial reasons why they aren’t cancelling it. I can tell you why. It’s all because of the make believe rules of Accounting (or the GAAP as their known). It’s a very similar situation to what Paradox Interactive just went through recently with another game famously in development hell, VTM Bloodlines 2.
On Ubisoft’s Balance Sheet, they have Beyond Good & Evil 2 and it’s associated development costs listed as an asset. That asset presently has had a dev cost/valuation to the company internally in excess of $500 Million as detailed in the article. Presently, as Ubisoft continues to spend money on development, on the balance sheet it continues to accrue value for that asset.
What will happen is 30 days after BG&E2 releases, they will revise their valuation of the asset to be reflective of its sales and projected sales, rather than the dev costs. Then they will perform a write down for the difference in valuations.
So in layman’s terms, according to the rules of accounting, technically Ubisoft hasn’t officially lost the money yet on their balance sheet until they do the sales adjustment write down to change the valuation of BG&E2 as an asset to the company.
This is important because if they cancelled it now, they would have to take the already incurred loss on their balance sheet now as well. Doing that now will negatively impact the valuation of Ubisoft as a whole and their stock price. So they just continue developing it further delaying the hit.
For every fiscal year until they cancel or release it, they get to keep playing pretend in La La Land like they’re still in the green until they can get the company into a stronger position to take the hit or attempt to make something back off the investment