Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Never Stood A Chance

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:James Lucas

Published Oct 25, 2024

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via Ubisoft

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was never given a chance. One of Ubisoft’s boldest and most experimental games of the last decade, this Metroidvania brought back the dormant series after 14 long years to critical acclaim. It was everything the company needed to begin tearing down the image of a factory churning out slop. But any hopes for a sequel were dashed this week when reports surfaced that Ubisoft had rejected the developer’s pitch for a sequel due to poor sales — all in favour of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a needless Rayman remake.

It’s a flimsy excuse, to say the least. According to , The Lost Crown made $15 million in revenue with over 300,000 players within its first month. By October 23, it was reported to have . We don’t know how much the game cost to develop, but considering it’s a 2.5D side scrolling Met🔥roidvania, as opposed𓄧 to the enormous, photorealistic open world RPGs we otherwise see from Ubisoft, it was undoubtedly a cheaper production than usual.

Unreasonable expectations may have been placed on the game, whi🔯ch we unfortunately see all too often in this in✨dustry, and seems likely given those figures. But even if the game underperformed and lost money, the blame hardly lies at the feet of its creators.

Sargon close-up from Prince of Persia The Lost Crown.

Ubisoft tied an anchor around The Lost Crown from day one by snubbing Steam. On PC, the game only launched on Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Connect, later arriving on Valve’s platform in the much busier season of August. There’s the obvious problem of the two storefronts being unpopular, with many gamers pro🍸fessing that they’d rather wait out the exclusivity and buy games on Steam at a later date. But looking at pure numbers, Ubisoft was tapping into a much smaller audience right from the very start.

EGS has around 75 million active users per month (thanks, ). Steam, on the other hand, has 132 million active users per month, with around 69 million per day. Snubbing Steam meant snubbing a much larger user base, which — putting reputation aside — will inevitably harm sales. The Lost Crown would have lik🔥ely performed much better had it opened on both PC platforms.

Larian Studios director of publishing Michael Douse likewise believes that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it would have “been a market success” if it launched on Steam.

The other obvious problem with skipping Steam is that in doing so, Ubisoft also skipped the Steam Deck, which Valve claims to have sold “multiple millions” of. A 2.5D platformer is perfect for the handheld, but users woul🉐d have to fiddle with third-party applications on the desktop to get Lost Crown working via EGS, which is som🍷ething only a small fraction will bother with.

Prince Of Persia Lost Crown Sargon jumping toward griffin boss, ready to attack

What’s even more egregious is that French journalist Gautoz claims Ubisoft gave up on The Lost Crown shortly after launch due to the supposed poor sales. This likely means that Ubisoft made up its mind before it even launched on Steam, giving it no time at all to find an audience. It sent this new Prince of Persia out to die with a mismana🎉ged launch strategy, far less marketing than its other flagships, and then disbanded the team. All while publicly stating in the fallout of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws that it wants to rehabilitate its image. How it plans to do that when undercutting its critical darlings is beyond me.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown should have been an enormous event, a return for one of Ubisoft’s most beloved legacy series after over a decade⛎, but it wasn’t given the same care and attention as its other heavy hitters. It’s no surprise then that after launching on less popular marketplaces with little backing that it didn’t meet expectations: it never could have in those circumstances.

To reject a sequel outright and shrug off the potential of such a brilliant game that many critics were even pushing for GOTY is for the management at Ubisoft to shirk all responsibility — there’s a future here that is going completely untapped, all because h🐲igher-ups can’t admit that they’re at fault.