Larian director of publishing Michael Douse, never one to be shy about speaking his mind, has spoken his mind about Ubisoft's decision to disband the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown development team, saying it's the result of a "broken strategy" that prioritizes subscriptions over sales.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is quite good. PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor felt it was dragged down by a very slow start, calling it "a slow burn to a fault" in an overall positive review, and it holds an enviable 86 aggregate score on Metacritic. Despite that, Ubisoft recently confirmed that the development team has been scattered to the four winds to work on "other projects that will benefit from their expertise."
This, Douse feels, is at least partially the outcome of Ubisoft's focus on subscriptions over conventional game sales—the whole "feeling comfortable with not owning your game" thing espoused by Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay earlier this year—and the decision to stop releasing games on Steam, which is far and away the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming.
"The last notable game on their platform was arguably Far Cry 6 in 2021," Douse posted on X (via GamesRadar). "The Crew, Mirage and Avatar came in 2023 and didn’t perform, so you can assume subscriptions were at a lull when PoP released by 2024. Which means people wouldn’t be launching their store all too much.
"If it had released on Steam 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+ game—it is much, much easier to release one. It just shouldn’t be done as it was."
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown did eventually come to Steam, but not until August 8, seven months after its initial release. It's been as well received there as elsewhere, holding a very positive user rating, but that far down the road the proverbial wind was out of its sails, and decisions about a sequel (and the fate of the dev team) were presumably already locked in.
"If the statement 'gamers should get used to not owning their games' is true because of a specific release strategy (sub above sales), 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," Douse wrote.
Ubisoft has arguably seen the error of its ways to some extent. After years of keeping PC releases to its own storefront and the Epic Games Store, Ubisoft's games began trickling back to Steam in 2022. It announced a wholesale return to the storefront in September, saying that all future releases, including the delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows, will launch on Steam on day one.
It's worth remembering that even when you purchase games on Steam, you don't really "own" them in the traditional sense: You are paying for a license to use them, and that can be taken away from you at any time, for any number of reasons. But, with all due respect to GOG, Steam is where most PC gamers buy their stuff, and in the digital marketplace that now dominates PC gaming, that license agreement is de facto ownership. Publishers avoid the storefront at their peril.
Which isn't to say a Steam release would've ensured a long, bright future of togetherness and sequels for The Lost Crown dev team: It's also available on PlayStation 4 and PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch, which seemingly didn't add up to stellar sales. But Douse said it was an ideal fit for the Steam storefront and Steam Deck, and being there would've given it a better chance at finding an audience than not being there: "It can’t resonate with an audience it doesn’t reach because it isn’t on a platform at the right moment."
"For premium games Steam on PC is about 90%+ of your total sales on that platform, probably slightly lower if you own your own platform," he wrote. "If you remove the Steam platform at peak of relevance you’re removing 90% average of your potential audience. Quite substantial."
Douse isn't the only Larian stalwart to feel this way: In January, Larian founder Swen Vincke said "it's going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model" because that will leave subscription service owners as the final arbiter of which games do and don't get made. That's maybe a debatable point, but the bottom line, Vincke said, is this: "You won't find our games on a subscription service."
