Usually around this time of year I think back to some of my favorite games from the previous year and prepare for Game of the Year conversations. Instead, this week I was pissed because the development team of one of my absolute favorite games of 2024 had just been scattered to all corners of the world. 2024 isn’t even over yet, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has apparently been written off by Ubisoft higher up.
Abdelhak Elguess, the game’s senior producer, said Eurogamer Wednesday said that “most team members who cooperated Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown have moved on to other projects that will benefit from their expertise.” And according to Insider gamingthese projects reportedly include a Rayman game, the next Ghost Recon game, and Beyond good and evil 2 (which has been in development hell since it was first announced in 2008 – that’s right, 2008).
That’s despite The lost crown team that pitched a sequel that would have kept them all together. Again, according to the same report from Insider Gaming, that sequel was rejected due to the game falling short of sales expectations.
The lost crowna sharp 2D Metroidvania with fluid combat, a cool story, and super customizable difficulty settings, wasn’t just a critical darling here at Polygon. It has an 86 on it Metacritical and “Very Positive” reviews Steam. The game has reportedly been sold one million copiesbut apparently that wasn’t enough. (Ominous news for Ubisoft Star Wars Outlawswho also has it only one million sold.)
Whose fault is it if the game doesn’t sell well? Certainly not the developers of The lost crownwhich was again critically acclaimed and loved by many of the people who did play it. That sounds like a marketing problem, not a development problem. So why split up a team of people who have already created something great? Building a cohesive, successful team is a huge challenge. If Ubisoft’s decision makers didn’t want that team to work on a new Prince of Persia game, fine, but why not assign the team to a new project while keeping them all together?
Baldur’s Gate 3 exec Michael Douse seems to agree. Douse wrote a thread on X (formerly Twitter) about the failure of Ubisoft’s leadership The lost crownand in particular the fact that the game was only released on Steam in August of this year. “If it had been released on Steam,” he says wrote“Not only would it have been a market success, but there would probably be a sequel because the team is so strong. It’s such a broken strategy. The hardest part is making an 85+ (on Metacritic) game; it’s much, much easier to release one. It just shouldn’t have happened the way it was.
“If the statement ‘gamers have to get used to not owning their games’ is true because of a specific release strategy (sub over sales),” he says continued“then the statement ‘developers have to get used to not having a job if they make a critically acclaimed game’ (platform strategy over title sales) is also true, and that simply doesn’t make sense – even from a business perspective.”
I’m not sure if an earlier Steam release would have made a difference The lost crown or not, but I do know that releasing a game in early January is a weird move. Very few major games are released during that period; I guess that’s because most people are busy playing the games they got as a gift during the holidays, and if you don’t manage to get a game out for During the holidays you climb uphill to get mainstream attention.
Or maybe it was the shadow of the Sand of time remake, also in development hell, causing people to be turned off by another Prince of Persia game. After all, The lost crown not the Prince in the lead role, so if that’s what players wanted, they might not have given this game a chance. Or, in looking for other explanations, some might look to the accumulation of racist comments the first reveal trailer for this game, which saw the debut of the black, non-Prince protagonist an original hip-hop song. It’s hard to say how much bigots affect sales; there isn’t enough data on that. But I will say that as someone who enjoyed the song and the atmosphere of the trailer, I have to admit: that trailer doesn’t really match the video game. The game’s soundtrack also ownsbut it has a very different soundscape that combines both contemporary and historical musical influences. It feels like no one at Ubisoft knows how to sell this game, which is stupid and frustrating because it’s incredibly good.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown deserved better. The team of developers deserved another chance to continue making cool games together. So as we head into GOTY season, I continue to be angry about this.