When Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown released in January of last year, it received wide critical acclaim, but then bombed in sales. In spite of Ubisoft’s poor reputation, the low turnout for this title was both frustrating and a little confusing. It was the long awaited return of a classic video game franchise, and fit the popular trope of shorter games with worse graphics, suggesting that good games made a lower scale than AAA were more likely to succeed. Unfortunately, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown seems to have disproven that meme as the gamers didn’t actually show up for it.
Later last year, a report came out that Ubisoft rejected pitches for a Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown sequel, and disbanded the team. There seems to be some confusion about this report, so we need to clarify two things:
- Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s developers were not reported to have been laid off, but were dispersed to other teams, and
- Ubisoft never went on record to confirm this report.
These facts seem to be important now, as the official Prince of Persia Twitter account made a surprising but welcome announcement:
“Well over 2M players by now.
You’ve revived the legend. The Prince is back, and believe us — he’s just warming up.”
While it took a little longer than Ubisoft would have wanted, selling 2 million units in a year and a half is still a decent achievement. This may mean that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown went past the point of breaking even, and even made enough profits that it can now be definitely considered a success. If Ubisoft simply wanted to thank fans for making the game profitable, they would not have dropped any hints of a comeback. So, while they haven’t made any official press releases, we can actually take this as a positive sign for a potential revival of Prince of Persia’s Metroidvania spinoff franchise.
We would also note that Ubisoft is in a better position now to change their mind and greenlight production on a smaller scale title. Even if a possible Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown sequel will also take a little longer to be profitable, since Assassin’s Creed Shadows turned out to be a huge success, they can make these small risk, small reward projects for a small, but tidy profit.
We’ll see if this turns out to be idle talk, or if we’re entering an age of Prince of Persia Metroidvanias after all.
