“Move over Hollow Knight,” declared Katharine (RPS in peace) in our Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown review, summarising this freshly-honed hunk of POP art as “a deep and challenging Metroid-like with some of the best platforming this side of Moon’s Ori games.” Sadly, for all the plaudits, the game doesn’t seem to have earned sufficient megabucks to justify keeping its development team together. Earlier this week, French journalist Gautoz reported that Ubisoft had disbanded The Lost Crown’s core dev team after turning down proposals for a sequel and further expansions. Speaking to RPS this morning, Ubisoft have confirmed that “most” of the Lost Crown’s dev team have moved onto other projects, while noting that there have been no layoffs as a result.
Find the Gautoz report on Youtube, which is based on conversations with anonymous developers. Beware that it’s in French. And here’s Ubisoft’s statement in full from the game’s senior producer, Abdelhak Elguess.
I’m extremely proud of our team’s work and passion at Ubisoft Montpellier to create a game that resonated with players and critics alike, and I am confident in its long-term success. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is now at the end of its Post-Launch roadmap with three free content updates and one DLC that released in September. We are now focusing on making the game available to more players: it was recently launched on Steam, and will be available on Mac by this winter. 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.
We know players have a love for this brand and Ubisoft is excited to bring more Prince of Persia experiences in the future.
Ubisoft are in a prickly place at the moment. Back in September, one investor threatened to organise a rebellion and depose the founding Guillemot brothers in response to disappointing returns on blockbuster games, not least Star Wars Outlaws. Ubisoft subsequently kicked back the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows to 2025 to avoid another Outlaws-style spongy landing. It’s also reported that the Guillemots and Tencent, who are currently minority shareholders, are considering buying the company out. All this occurs against the backdrop of labour action, with 700 staff in France striking in response to a return to the office mandate.
Taking a longer view, Ubisoft are one among many larger publishers who are struggling to justify smaller, more eccentric projects such as The Lost Crown, which don’t aim for the whopping revenues currently expected of the triple-As. As Graham has just lamented to me in our Slack, Ubisoft once had more of a track record for oddball B-listers and smaller artisanal curios – games like Driver, the musically minded Rayman reboots, Mario + Rabbids, and Child Of Light. Nowadays, projects of that scope with relatively modest commercial ambitions don’t seem to cut the mustard.
As our guides writer Jeremy added in the same Slack chat, Ubisoft have also really muddled the waters with Prince Of Persia in particular. The Lost Crown has had to compete for attention with another POP side-scroller created by a third-party, Evil Empire’s The Rogue Prince Of Persia. Like Star Wars Outlaws, it was also exclusive to Ubisoft’s own storefront for the first few months of release, reducing the impact of its eventual release on Steam, the largest PC marketplace. Finally, The Lost Crown has had to contend lingering uncertainty about the long-promised, much-delayed Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time remake, which is now slated to launch in 2026.