No layoffs involved
“Move overHollow Knight,” declared Katharine (RPS in peace) in ourPrince 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 onYoutube, 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.
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.
