Rayman Legends – 10 years on from the near perfect platformer, but what’s next for Rayman?

thesixthaxis.com:

We didn’t know it at the time, but the launch of Rayman Legends on 30th August 2013 was to be an abrupt end of the line for Rayman’s 2010s resurgence. A direct sequel to 2011s Rayman Origins, Legends received stellar reviews across the board, and sold millions of copies as it spread across numerous platforms, but ten years on and it remains the last mainline Rayman game released by Ubisoft.

The confounding thing about this is that between Rayman Origins series revival and Rayman Legends two years later, it felt as though Ubisoft had struck 2D platforming gold. The controls are exceptionally tight and responsive, while the art direction is sublime – these games pioneered the UbiArt Engine which allowed developers to bring digital art directly into their games – and it featured four player co-op at exactly the right time to appeal to fans of Nintendo’s co-op antics in New Super Mario Bros. Wii and later.

Unfortunately, Origins and Legends just weren’t as successful as Ubisoft hoped – tellingly, it sold best on the Wii U at launch. Rayman Legends might have been reaching 1 million copies sold after a few months on sale, but it would take several years and re-releases on PS4, Xbox One and much later on Switch for it to approach that 4.5 million sales mark. Rayman’s time back in the sun was already at an end.

Rayman continued on in some ways. There was Rayman Fiesta Run for mobile, acting as a sequel to Rayman Jungle Run, and Rayman Mini came in 2019 as a mini-platformer for Apple Arcade. Ubisoft have seemed to relegated Rayman back down to a second tier character, prioritising other franchises. In 2019, a comedy animated series for Rayman, along others, with Ubisoft’s Film & Television arm set to create it. However, as of now