Ubisoft Cancels Animal Crossing Competitor After 3 Years in Development

Back in 2024, Ubisoft announced a new social life sim inspired by Nintendo’s beloved Animal Crossing franchise. The game went by the code name Alterra, and it was set to feature social elements for players to interact with both NPCs and fellow players. Now, however, the project has joined the ranks of games cancelled by Ubisoft this year. For any Animal Crossing fans who were hoping Ubisoft might deliver a new game while we wait for the next installment from Nintendo, one contender is apparently no more.

On April 21st, Insider Gaming reports that Ubisoft staff working on Alterra received notice that the game will not be moving forward. This makes it the 7th game cancelled by Ubisoft this year alone, following the January announcement that 6 games were getting the axe. As of now, we don’t have intel on why the project was cancelled, but we do know that there will be one less Animal Crossing competitor headed our way.

Animal Crossing-Inspired Project Alterra Scrapped by Ubisoft

Despite the game’s announcement back in 2024, few concrete details about Alterra ever emerged. We knew it would be a social sim inspired by Animal Crossing, and that it would also pull in Minecraft-inspired building mechanics. Early game images showed a voxel art style and Funko Pop-adjacent NPCs, and that’s honestly about all we know. According to Insider Gaming, the project had been in development for 3 years before its cancellation. Given how little we’ve seen from it in that time, it’s not clear how far along the game was before Ubisoft decided to shut it down.

The game’s pitch certainly brings to mind another wildly successful Animal Crossing competitor, Pokemon Pokopia. With the success of that game, alongside a somewhat lukewarm reception to the 3.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it’s quite possible that Ubisoft simply decided the timing for their pitch had passed. Many Animal Crossing competitors have been released since the project’s initial announcement, after all, and many of them have failed to capture what made New Horizons take off. As of now, however, Ubisoft has not publicly confirmed the reasoning behind cancelling Alterra.

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The silver lining here is that, as of now, it appears that no layoffs will be attached to the latest cancelled project at Ubisoft. Instead, staff are reportedly being moved to other projects. That said, with so many cancelled games and delayed projects at Ubisoft, it’s hard to say what will become of the studios that were working on this latest scrapped game.

For those still rooting for Ubisoft, there is some good news from the troubled studio this week. The long-rumored remake of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag is getting its official reveal later on April 23rd after being finally confirmed by Ubisoft on X (formerly Twitter). Hopefully, this long-awaited remake of a beloved game can deliver the success that Ubisoft needs to keep moving with other delayed projects, rather than shutting down more unreleased games.

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