Fresh off the disastrous Steam release of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Ubisoft seems determined to fast-track their financial ruin by axing the development team behind Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown due to its underwhelming sales.
According to a report from French outlet Origami, Ubisoft has dissolved Ubisoft Montpellier, formerly known as Ubisoft Pictures, one of their many offshoot development studios. The Castelnau-le-Lez-based team was known for creating titles like ZombiU, a unique horror game exclusive to the ill-fated Nintendo Wii U with clever gamepad integration, as well as developing Beyond Good & Evil and the beloved Rayman series.
However, the failure of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has seemingly sealed the fate of the studio, which was also responsible for the eternally delayed Beyond Good & Evil 2. Ubisoft has officially pulled the plug on them.
Journalist Gautoz has reported that Ubisoft Montpellier was told straight up that after the cosmetics and DLC for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown were done, “it would be the end.” To rub salt in the wound, the team even pitched a sequel, but Ubisoft shot it down. Then they tried for two expansions, also denied because Ubisoft claimed they needed more hands on projects with better sales potential.
In fact, Ubisoft thought a sequel would actually hurt The Lost Crown’s long-term sales though this was likely piss and wind.
Ubisoft is practically the poster child for how ideologically driven ESG/DEI initiatives, pushed by giants like BlackRock can hollow out a company from the inside by prioritizing inclusivity quotas over, you know, making games that people actually want to buy.
Their financial spiral just keeps getting worse, with disasters like Skull & Bones, a pirate MMO that took a decade to make and still came out less feature-packed than Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and Star Wars Outlaws, where its ugly female protagonist is another glaring example of “woke” game dev studios butchering the likeness of a real actress into something unrecognizable just to tick some diversity box.
Ubisoft acknowledged that Star Wars Outlaws fell short of its sales targets, despite having the company’s largest marketing budget. Beyond the controversial, DEI-driven design of its overly masculine protagonist, the game’s poor reception is also tied to the constant backlash surrounding Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Ubisoft took “diversity and inclusivity” to a new level by reimagining the historical figure of Yasuke, a Black man in feudal Japan, as the central character in an entirely fictionalized samurai narrative. This move sparked outrage from gamers, while journalists predictably rushed to Ubisoft’s defense, throwing around terms like “racist” and “bigot,” buzzwords that have been losing their punch for a while now.
Even The New York Times weighed in with a piece defending Ubisoft’s creative choices, citing a transgender half-Japanese “consultant” from Sweet Baby Inc. The consultant argued that Japanese gamers weren’t actually offended by the blackwashing of their own history; instead, they claimed, foreign gamers using translation apps were pushing a false narrative.
After causing further offense with a commemorative figure of a one-legged torii gate, Ubisoft scrapped its plans to attend this year’s Tokyo Game Show and delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows until February of next year, likely to capitalize on Black History Month to shift focus away from its historical revisionism and the fact that the game will flop commercially thanks entirely due to its Black protagonist.
It’s a shame, especially when you consider that Ubisoft has had its moments of brilliance. Take the Prince of Persia series, for example. The Montreal team breathed new life into the franchise with The Sands of Time in 2003, which became a modern classic, selling 14 million copies by 2014. The sequels, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones, were nearly as well-received, cementing the series as one of Ubisoft’s most iconic properties, but obviously all good things must come to an end.
It’s ironic that a series literally called The Prince of Persia, known for featuring a strong and striking Persian protagonist, has now been modernized to fit Ubisoft’s current diversity mandates. Instead of honoring the series’ iconic character design, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown gave us a “modernized” protagonist, sporting the stereotypical “noodle hair” dreadlock fade that has become all too common in today’s game design when creating bland, uninspired Black characters for diversity points to win over ESG-backed investment firms.
Despite the game being well-received critically, with scores of 86 from critics and 8.5 from users on Metacritic, The Lost Crown struggled to move units.
The protagonist’s generic, racially inclusive design likely didn’t sit well with long-time fans of Prince of Persia. Ubisoft’s fix? Monetized DLC skins, letting you either give the character a more familiar, classic look, one that, had they centered the game around from the start, would’ve probably sold a lot more copies.
But, of course, without the ramen noodle hair, how else would they appeal to the elusive “modern audiences”? Seems like the focus on ticking diversity boxes overshadowed the idea of actually creating a protagonist that resonates with the core fanbases expectations.
Instead of leaning into what made Prince of Persia iconic, they opted for design choice that checked all the diversity boxes but failed to connect with the audience that made the series successful in the first place.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was a solid metroidvania, one of the few standout releases of 2024, all things considered judging by reception alone. However, its overly modernized, progressive take on what Prince of Persia “should” look like sent die-hard fans running for the hills, well before the Assassin’s Creed Shadows controversy even hit the headlines.
And it didn’t help that the game launched on January 18th, a day before Palworld, the indie phenomenon that took the world by storm, selling over six million copies in just four days. Prince of Persia? It barely managed to scrape 300,000 copies in its opening weeks.
The supposed dissolution of the development team behind The Lost Crown adds to Ubisoft’s ever-growing pile of problems, as the company teeters on the brink of financial collapse. Rumors of a buyout by a consortium of Tencent and the Guillemot family loom over Ubisoft’s future.
With the studio responsible for this critical hit but commercial flop now axed, the fate of the Prince of Persia franchise seems dire. A sequel pitched by Ubisoft Montpellier was denied, and while under new ownership the franchise could see a revival or reboot, we’re likely several years away from anything materializing, if it even happens at all which it probably wont and neither will be see the radicalized modern take on Beyond Good & Evil 2 either.
