Ubisoft's Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Team Officially Disbanded

Bad sales are Ubisoft's own fault due to the way they price their games.

This sucks. Guess that means no more excellent 2D Rayman games, either. Mario + Rabbids guy is gone, too.

Really is just nothing left at Ubisoft for me.

Ubisoft continues to circle the drain but refuses to flush. Give it a few more months.

Origami is a great gaming outlet for french speakers, 100% recommended.

@Jeff_D this isn't Twitter.

Toxic culture of everything needing to sell a million +

@Jeff_D oh please. The “anti-woke” boycotters are a noisy tiny minority of insecure people who amount to few sales no company in their right mind would even want.

@jesse_dylan It's Incredible how they are still falling into the trap of 'smaller, cheaper games are not worth making because the labour would be more efficiently applied to AAA projects' whilst also losing money hand over fist on underperforming AAA projects and development hell megaprojects.

I’m actually so disappointed. I was definitely expecting a sequel to this amazing game

@Lrapsody yes, you have everyone running in fear, for sure… 🙄

@Vordus it’s a real shame. I’m old enough to remember gaming before the focus was on 5+ year mega projects that need to sell two copies to every citizen to even turn a profit. I suppose every industry goes through this. Film certainly has, and continues to struggle with it.

To quote Bradley Ellis, “Sort it out, Ubisoft!”

Ubisoft just make the same games over and over boring bloated games or crap remakes only good games they have made since the 360 for me are the south park and the trials games

Can't understand why they haven't made a Tom Clancey title utilising the Mario +Rabbids engine.
Surely a money maker across all platforms.
Or perhaps team up with Xbox for Halo Tactics.

They do good games, they just keep overpricing themselves out of the market.
So much competition these days not just on price but time to play the big titles.

Hoping Might and Magic comes to Xbox.

@Ricky-Spanish Except this isn’t one of them? Enough with the tired rhetoric and please gamers, enough with “bloat”. This is your new favourite crutch to rag on anything you dislike, it’s ridiculous how many of you are using this now. Have more original thought, I beg you.

I suspect this game’s problem was the type of game it was and its price point. Also, expecting a metroidvania to do big numbers based on an old IP you think is still hot enough to warrant them, well, that’s just stupid. So a lot of the fault is on themselves for being so unrealistic. But I didn’t want to spend that much money on that style of game. When it was new anyway, I see it available for a much more reasonable price now of course.

Almost perfect game. Sad it didn't sell more.

My game of the year. It was only half the price of a AAA game and it was worth EVERY single penny.

As gamers, we only have ourselves to blame if Ubisoft sticks to the same tired old formula. When they do try something new and it turns out great, no one buys it!

The amount of people I have seen that didn't buy this because;
too expensive
its a 2d side scroller
its cartoony

I honestly don't understand gamers some time. They just don't recognise great games half the time.

I know I personally skipped it because I wanted more 3D Prince of Persia.

Like Ninja Gaiden, the OG's are fantastic. But the 3D generation of them was just damn fine that I don't really have any interest in any PoP games that aren't similar.

@Kloppo I want a new one. But with how bad they botched Conviction and Blacklist, I don't know I want another Splinter Cell unless the IP changes hands.

Last thing I want is for them to do to it what they did to Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon.

@InheritNegative I'm sorry I upset you but I don't need to be original for you my friend so don't beg your better than that it's my opinion and the opinion of a lot of people hence why it's said so much and probably why people don't want to play Ubisoft games I get this game isn't a bloated mess but most of there games are those are facts no need to be upset because I don't think like you about BLOATED Ubisoft games that are a mess or just bad or not needed like this game have a good day 🙏🙆

I was talking days ago here or on NL about how Ubisoft was diversifying with Rayman Legends and Immortals Fenyx Rising, two of the best games in recent years and then a new Prince of Persia entry. They needed to do so, because focusing almost exclusively on Assassin's Creed is insane in the long term. Why many gamers didn't care about these games is beyond me. Immortals Fenyx Rising is a must-play and Rayman Legends is one of the best platformers ever.

Characters looked annoying so I didn’t play this. I’m quite enjoying the downfall of Ubi, hopefully more of the big triple A devs will follow.

@Banjo- you’re correct. Immortals was the best game they put out in years.

I am heartbroken, POP: The Lost Crown was the best game of this year for me but unfortunately to Ubisoft it doesn't matter how much it sold because it would have never been enough for them

we haven't had a Prince of Persia game for over a decade and to have come back as a masterpiece of a Metroidvania was great, it's a shame i really would have to have seen what they would've done with a sequel

Maybe Ubisoft should think about cancelling their gaming service, how can you expect great sales when you offer all your game library at 20$/month. In one month you can easily beat 3 to 4 Games.

@Fenbops enjoying their downfall and actively wishing for it to happen to other companies is extraordinarily unpleasant. You'd see thousands of people out of a job just so you can enjoy watching a company fail? Says so much about you, it really does.

@Scrubchub at least I’m honest. Have a good day sir.

@somnambulance Where are you getting the claim that it was profitable? I was under the impression that it sold very poorly. The only data I'm aware of is Insider Gaming listing 300,000 players 2 weeks after launch. For a game on a subscription service, that seems very low.

As a company, Ubisoft is as bloated as their games usually are. It's going to be painful and ugly, but they are going to have to trim a lot of staff and refocus. The only question is whether they do that themselves or sell to a new owner who does it.

Similar to hi fi rush. This game has nearly universal praise from those who tried it but hardly anyone tried it. 2d metroidvania is a pretty niche category. Supposedly launched to 300k sales. Ouch. It's not very hard to see the reasoning here. I am more upset that no one played this game than I am about ubisoft shifting everyone to other projects and basically saying there will be no sequel.

https://www.dualshockers.com/prince-of-persia-the-lost-crown-sales-struggle-not-surprising/?origin=serp_auto

@Fenbops I didn't play that Prince of Persia either, it looked a bit like the new characters in Crash Bandicoot 4. I read somewhere about an article about The Rings of Power, that all this is getting ridiculous and, at the same time, shallow, skin-deep. The original article said that Tolkien was racist because elves were white, like wtf are you talking about. I don't know if you have watched the second season, but I was far more distracted by the shoehorned variety than by anything else. Also, doesn't the new Joanna Dark look like Terminator? A wider jaw, even. In the new version of Sonic Generations, Knuckles is not allowed to make a joke about the rounder, classic version of Sonic.

The few times Ubisoft makes a great new original title, it almost never seems to be deemed successful. If not for Nintendo backing Sparks of Hope, that likely would've not been produced. POP finally returns, and it's deemed a failure. No follow-up to Starlink, or Fenyx. No sequel to Rayman legends... All genuinely good, fairly recent Ubisoft games. Ugh... So sad... 😔

I think we tend to forget just how small of a minority we are, those of us who frequent gaming sites as one of the regulars noted on PushSquare, we aren't going to really move the money needle
Even behemoths like IGN aren't going to sway the casual market that much.
Near perfect or not, it was a niche productmuch like Hi-Fi Rush.
To top it off, we are absolutely bombarded with games, more choices than anyone can possibly get through

@Scrubchub Sorry to step in, but knowing him a little bit, I don't think that he really means it, just probably tired of everyone being politically correct and just a way of saying he disapproves what they've being doing lately, in a small community where he can speak his mind.

Metroidvania is a niche genre. I hope they budgeted accordingly.

Something is off PoP Lost Crown IMO. It's like the problematic PoP movie 14 years ago starring an American and pasty white British woman. Something's off with the lead characters.

@Banjo- I appreciate you trying to understand my friend but I really don’t care. You are right I’m tired but social media has also shown us what type of people a lot of these devs are and I really dislike them. Its easy to say I must be a horrible person or whatever, I don’t care what some random on the internet thinks about me, they know nothing

@jesse_dylan Well that's interesting, considering when the anti-woke boycotters don't buy things they tend to fail, and when the pro-woke people promote things they fail too. 'Promote' being the correct word since the sales and playerbase counts say they don't play or buy games themselves.

@shoeses you’re making false associations. Just because you make a boycott a ritual doesn’t mean you have any effect. People tend to promote the games they like, and for a myriad of reasons. People tend to boycott for some pretty ridiculous reasons. They don’t have binary pronouns, or they put shorts and a bra on a girl under her plate mail bikini and people boycott? It barely exists. You’re dreaming and imagining you have any sway at all. Buy what you like, don’t buy what you don’t like, and let that be that. Anything more is coming from mean-spirited spite and fear, and some abject aversion to change.

'False associations'? Games that appeal to the phantom modern audience like Dustborn, Concord, Forspoken, Unknown 9 Awakening, and Star Wars Outlaws flop miserably, while games that focus on being an actual fun experience like Black Myth Wukong, Stellar Blade, & Space Marine 2 see success. Seems pretty factual when comparing the sales, peak and daily player counts, & user reviews. There're more people defending the woke games than people who actually played them.

You also say, "don’t buy what you don’t like", which is what a boycott is, belittling the people who do it and saying boycotting is ridiculous and pointless in the same message, when it's very clearly working when they do it and not when you do.

Lastly fear of change is only bad if the change is positive. You know there's bad ones, right? Cancer, bankruptcy, death - those are all changes. Considering the Publishers and Devs that make changes you consider positive are hemorrhaging money, do you think maybe you're the one filled with 'mean-spirited spite'? Because it seems you want the industry to fail and burn.

Sweet dreams.~

@shoeses I've never seen a single person defend Dustborn. Or promote Dustborn. I've never seen anyone give one jot of a care about Dustborn, a weird niche small-studio Norwegian game that absolutely anyone could have looked at and said 'yeah, that's not actually getting bought by anyone' anywhere along the process. To include it in the list alongside big AAA failures like the utterly disastrously mispromoted me-too hero shooter Concord is intellectually dishonest.

Your grifter-led movement claims credit for massive sweeping market forces. It ignores the actual market conditions and blames everything on 'Woke'. You ignore elements like Wukong's focus on the massive protectionist Chinese market because it doesn't suit your narrative. You ignore the fact that both Star Wars and Ubisoft have produced the same formula over and over to the point where neither have the same cultural cache. You ignore the massive success of titles like Baldur's Gate 3, the Verhoven-styled cultural satire in Helldivers 2, or indie juggernauts with diverse characters like Hades 2 so that you don't have to deal with trying to explain why they succeeded (spoilers, it's because they're great games that stuck out in an overcrowded market).

Weirdly you both claim that 'woke' games are causing the industry to fail, but also that your 'boycotts' (which is mostly a lot of screaming in comments about games that you weren't going to buy anyway) work. If people aren't buying the games, then the boycott is redundant.

The problem in the industry isn't 'woke'. The problem is that development costs and time are ballooning, and after two decades where the AAA industry has obsessed over putting more and more eggs into fewer and fewer baskets it has no idea how to with the idea that those baskets might fall apart. It tries to make bland games that appeal to everyone, and end up appealing to nobody.

Meanwhile, the massive investment that came into the industry during the pandemic has resulted in an absolute abundance of games. Far too many games. The industry straight up cannot support the amount of games currently on the market. Over the summer I watched trailers for over 12,000 games. Most of those games will fail. Some of them will be high-profile failures, most will be forgotten.

Companies need to be sensible as their shareholders want them to be.

Indie titles can be niche and cater to gay people and crossdressers, and possibly profit from their small audience, but AAA cannot. If they want to sell AAA and make money they need to start pandering to the majority again, i.e straight men, and maybe the other 30% are straight women? Otherwise, they will just go bankrupt. I don't see the point. We want to give them money to make good products that are organic and have artistic integrity, but political propaganda isn't enjoyable.

@Lrapsody No one was scared. You can't violate rules and then say you're "scaring" people.

@jesse_dylan I can't comment upon that, as it counts as criticising moderation, but I didn't scare anyone, no, twas sarcasm.