10 years of ubisoft montpellier:
2003: work on beyond good & evil wraps. it ships on three separate days in 2003 for the three main consoles. no marketing strategy behind it whatsoever. when the game fails alongside sands of time, ubisoft chooses to save sands of time over beyond good & evil, promising that ancel would be able to make a sequel.
2005: peter jackson is impressed with beyond good & evil and requests michel ancel head up the king kong game based on the film. ancel/montpellier stops work on bge2 and makes king kong.
2006: rayman 4 is being prepared as wii game. however, in order to make launch date, ubisoft's top brass make the team turn it into a party game. the team is really seriously given the time to do what they want to do at this point.
2007-2008: bge2 development starts again, and a teaser is shown in 2008. game is being made with a small team.
2009: for some reason, ubisoft frameworks starts up instead and ancel returns to the rayman franchise to see it through. it's meant to demonstrate the ease of development, and the rayman origins game is meant to be an origin story for rayman as well as an episodic series of games. the team is also pulled apart to focus on rabbids go home and the adventures of tintin.
2010-2011: rayman slowly gets turned from a series of episodic games into one retail game. the original idea for the game as an origin story is completely ditched. the game comes out with a commercial in which kal penn berates the game for thirty seconds and is subsequently murdered.
i am not joking. after being wished good luck on bge2 from ramirez from skies of arcadia, michel ancel winces and says, 'it will be a while...'
2012-2013: work starts on rayman legends as a wii u exclusive. they also help out with the development of zombi u. unable to meet the first release date, they set a second one in february and work their asses off to meet it. when they do, the release date is pushed back and they are made to make the game again, but with feeling.
basically, for the last ten years michel ancel has been trying to make a sequel to one game and ubisoft seems oblivious to this. 'oh you're not doing anything. make king kong/rayman party game/rabbids platformer game/tintin/etc'