Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown deserved better than Ubisoft

Usually, around this time of year, I’m thinking back on some of my favorite games of the previous year and prepping for Game of the Year conversations. Instead, I’ve spent this week being pissed off that one of my absolute favorite games of 2024 just had its development team scattered to the four winds. 2024 isn’t even over yet, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has apparently been written off by Ubisoft higher-ups.

Abdelhak Elguess, the game’s senior producer, told Eurogamer on Wednesday that “most of the team members who worked on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown have shifted to other projects that will benefit from their expertise.” And according to Insider Gaming, those projects allegedly are 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 pitching a sequel that would have kept them all together. Again, according to Insider Gaming’s same report, that sequel was rejected due to the game lagging behind on sales expectations.

The Lost Crown, a crisp 2D Metroidvania with fluid combat, a cool story, and super-adjustable difficulty settings, wasn’t just a critical darling here at Polygon. It’s got an 86 on Metacritic and “Very Positive” reviews on Steam. The game reportedly sold one million copies, but apparently, that wasn’t enough. (Ominous news for Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, which has also only sold one million.)

Whose fault is it if the game didn’t sell well? Surely not the developers of The Lost Crown, which again, was critically acclaimed and beloved 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 created something great already? Building a cohesive, successful team is extremely challenging. If Ubisoft decision-makers didn’t want that team to work on another 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 Ubisoft leadership having failed The Lost Crown, and in particular, the fact that the game wasn’t released on Steam until August of this year. “If it had released on Steam,” he wrote, “not only would it have been a market success, but there would likely be a sequel because the team are so strong. It’s such a broken strategy. The hardest thing is to make a 85+ [on Metacritic] game — it is much, much easier to release one. It just shouldn’t be done as it was.

“If the statement ‘gamers should get used to not owning their games’ is true because of a specific release strategy (sub above sales),” he continued, “then the statement ‘developers must get used to not having jobs if they make a critically acclaimed game’ (platform strategy above title sales) is also true, and that just isn’t sensible — even from a business perspective.”

I’m not sure whether an earlier Steam release would have made a difference for The Lost Crown or not, but I do know that putting out a game in early January is a weird move. Very few major games come out in that time period; I would guess that’s because most people are busy playing whatever games they received as gifts over the holidays, and if you can’t manage to put out a game before the holiday season, you’ll be climbing uphill to get mainstream attention on it.

Or maybe it was the shadow of the Sands of Time remake, also in development hell, that led people to be turned off by a different Prince of Persia game. After all, The Lost Crown doesn’t star the Prince, so if that’s what players wanted, they may not have given this game a chance. Or, in seeking other explanations, some might look to the pile-up of racist comments on the first reveal trailer for this game, which debuted its Black, non-Prince protagonist with an original hip-hop song. It’s hard to say how much bigots affect sales; there’s not enough data on that. But I will say, as somebody who enjoyed the trailer’s song and vibe, I gotta admit — that trailer doesn’t really match the video game. The game’s soundtrack also owns, but it has a very different soundscape that meshes both contemporary and historical musical influences. It feels like no one at Ubisoft could figure out how to sell this game, which is stupid and frustrating, because it’s incredibly good.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown deserved better. Its team of developers deserved another chance to keep making cool games together. So as we enter GOTY season, well, I’m going to keep on being angry about this.