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@Michael.. 1 - France's labour laws prevented Ubisoft from dumping staff after disbanding the POP team. The studio in question was Montepellier, not some place in NA where they could just layoff the entire team otherwise they no doubt would have. 2 - Larian's Publishing Director called Ubisoft out for their business decision to NOT release POP on Steam as they were trying to use it to promote their Store front, there were NO platform fees. Ubisoft sabotaged their own game and IP by trying to force players to the Ubisoft Store / subscription instead of selling their game on Steam and/or Epic. Ubisoft crying that they only sold 300,000 units on the Ubisoft Store tells you how stupid their business people are.
Uuuhhhh On point 2, I actually worked on the game, we released it on Epic game hence exclusivity clause that prevented us from releasing it to steam for a while so I dont know what you are on about ?
@@xefiria6982don't epic pay you for that exclusivity? Also comparing epic and ubisoft store is like comparing mini market on rural area with huge supermarket inside mall. Epic has burn a lot of money giving out free game, exclusivity deal for years to gain a lot of audiance. How many user ubisoft store have? How many epic have?
@ribertfranhanreagen9821 yeah the deal is you get a bunch of money but you dont get to use other plate-forms to distribute your game for a set period of time that you negociate (not including console platforms like you can still sell on the nintendo shop ofc). If you ask me it was a very dumb short term minded decision and the game would have benefited from being on steam day one, but I dont make the calls I am just a game dev.
Bought it, it's not that great.Writing is absolutely atrocious. Gameplay is mediocre. Character designs are okay. There's this pattern that i've noticed of all the new "creatives" obviously haven't had hardships or really lived outside of their city bubble. It's just a copy of a copy. It doesn't convey any human emotions. Also, its not a "Prince of Persia" game, it just has the name.
@@nahuelkid I’ve heard about the game but Ubisoft said we gamers should be comfortable not owning games. I would pirate Ubisoft games but dei games aren’t worth pirating.
They told us to own nothing and be happy. So we are telling Ubisoft, no more business and be happy. If they want to kill their best teams let them, means those best teams can reform and make their own stuff without Ubisoft HR team in the room
@@srdjan455 He meant "reform as an independent studio" unaffiliated with Ubisoft. It's not the developers that are the issue, it's the publishers (at least the triple-A publishers).
I think the issue is that Ubisoft has ruined their reputation so much that I just assume all their games are either mid or bad. I don't follow the development of any of their games anymore.
Throwing a tantrum and taking their ball and going home (removing their games from sale on Steam) was the height of baseless arrogance and wilful ignorance, significantly contributing to the collapse of profitability. I hadn't noticed a single Ubisoft release since they left and now that they are back, I couldn't care enough to remember a single release for more than a few seconds after seeing it. Why should I? But the idiots at the top making the worst, greediest, most anti-consumer decisions possible (how many Ubisoft NFT/live service game cancellations now?) will never have to face any real world consequences for their greed and stupidity, all the actual workers have to bear that load on behalf of the brain dead billionaires in charge...
@@cooltwittertag I didn't like it. It was the epitome of Ubisoft problems - pretty visuals paired with mediocre gameplay and bad writing. It was overpriced for what it was and just straight out inferior to just about any Metroidvania I've played in the last decade. I honestly wouldn't pick it up for more than £14.99, let alone the £45 they've asked for... Needless to say, the game was down to £17.99 in 3 months after release so sales figures were abysmal. Don't get me wrong, if you've enjoyed it then all the power to you but personally it was a waste of time I would've spent better playing Blasphemous again... Maybe if I didn't play metroidvanias and this was my first game of this type I could've enjoyed it. Maybe 🤔
Nintendo USED to do discounts. Right up through the Wii, you'd see games cut down to $20 and sold as "Player's Choice" label games. That used to be normal for them.
Speaking as an accounting professional, I'm guessing that Nintendo figured out that a smaller number of sales but at $60 a pop (and that $40 being more or less pure profit) had a higher z (as in x units times y net-profit dollars equals z money made from game) than the higher volume of Player's Choice sales. Probably by a significant enough margin to make up for the soft value of bringing in more potential future customers.
I mean, they’re using Nintendo Switch Online to do discounts and stuff, so that’s nice, since you build up gold points for each purpose. But hey, they’ll definitely make enough money considering the fact that the Nintendo Switch Successor is confirmed to be backwards compatible, which will boost the money they get for older Switch games. It’s a smart move.
I've grown tired of these developers wanting every single title to be a breakout hit. It feels like that is all they are shooting for instead of making games that people like and want to keep the wallet fed, then do the breakout stuff along with those. These days it feels like everyone is just paying billions to hit the same mark and it doesn't work.
Yea, when the companies go 'public' this is what happens. The Shareholders hear about the ridiculous numbers of Fortnite etc ( with their VERY shady practices that needs to be regulated btw ) so they expect EVERY GAME to be that. They think people have infinite money to give when the world economy is getting plunged to the depths.
@@BlueWoWTaylan more importantly, infinite amounts of time. Clearly people who already play massively time consuming games will have the time to squeeze in another game. You can't get "micro" transactions from the guy that didn't pick up the game because it requires more time than they have available or care to spend.
@@Anonymous-zu7dh Yea that too. There is only so many hours in a day for people to squeeze in a game and all these live-service stuff expect themselves to be the one. That is unsustainable
Literally the only reason for that pricing is like with every single other game they release. They make several tiers of the products, where the base is overpriced and subsequent editions reach level of pure absurdity and then they say you can have all that "value" (even though they haven't released any DLC content to any game in over a decade that is worth anything at all) by simply subscribing to their monthly plan for "attractive" sum of 17,99 a month 😂😂😂 🤷🏻
Whenever a big AAA publisher tries to horn in on a traditionally indie space, they completely fail to understand the consumer they're trying to sell to. See also Harvestella selling for $60 in a genre where Stardew Valley costs $15 and most games tend to launch between $25 and $30 USD.
@@chrism1966 You see, the thing is, Metroid Dread was a game deserving of that price, and was marketed adequately. Ubisoft has this problem where…. You need a ridiculous amount of money just to buy a console, and they can just take back what you buy. Not to mention they shoot themselves in the foot constantly.
And herein lies the problem of AAA companies making games on less than AAA budgets. The companies think that they are less worthy of marketing if they don’t cost a lot, but they still expect them to move the same amount of units. They are set up to fail unless it’s a live service, which will fail anyway.
The amount of money is irrelevant when bad management is the issue lmao. Look at concord, skull and bones, and other several million or near billion dollar productions that flopped after not even a month of existence. I've had more fun and trust in a game made on a $5 budget than ubislop
Imagine if Betheda decided to not make Oblivion because it would cannibalize the long term sales of Morrowind. What level of coked out MBA spreadsheet monkey do I need to be to understand this logic?
10:25 those teams were situated in France, right? French worker protection laws might be a more plausible reason than wanting to keep the talents... A company as big as Ubisoft can't just fire (French) workers for mistakes made by management, similar to Germany they'd have to consider every milder measure before firing people or pay high severance packages, unless they'd closed the whole studio location, firing everyone unwilling to relocate.
That sucks that it happened. I think Lost Crown had some impressive innovations for a Metroidvania. For example, I really enjoyed how you could mark up the map with notes. Really like how fast it was on top of being acrobatic in platorming. Such a shame this game didn't sell well. I know I bought it when I first saw it come out and didn't regret it at all. Hope that this games gets a cult following or isn't forgotten about because it deserves to be remembered.
For Ubisoft their best team is the one that makes them the most money. I don’t believe any of these companies believe in making great games at the executive level. We’ve seen it time and again now, a game can be great profitable even, but if it doesn’t make enough it’s seen as a failure (look at what happened to Tango).
@ Relatively minuscule. It’s also clear that games full of micro/macro transactions have the best RoI. Just look at the amount of money the $90 mount has made. On a reskin of a mount that already existed. BG3 would likely be seen as a failure with its lack of monetization. Even if adding cosmetics meant hurting their reputation or even losing the sales of some players, the money made off of them would have more than made up for it.
i wanted to try the demo for this game on the switch, downloaded it, and found out i had to create a ubisoft account to play the demo. I dipped after that. Not willing to trade personal info/data for a demo. If that roadblock hadn't been there, might have played and enjoyed the demo enough to buy the game. But instead I was turned off by dirty ubisoft and never looked back
While I can very much understand that you arent willing to create an ubisoft account, especially just for a demo, the data argument is quite funny (bad). You do know who owns this website... right? You either are against it and put this argument down painfully often, or you accept it (while still not liking it) and use services anyway. But this was just personal preference, not an attempt to protect your data. A decision that doesnt need any more reasons that "Ubisoft sucks". Its a valid point in itself. No need to pretend.
@@LiftandCoa creating a ubisoft account is deciding whether to trade data for the game demo experience and I voted no, it has nothing to do with google or other corps
@@LiftandCoa refusing to give your data to google means missing out on their dozens of extremely useful (and sometimes necessary especially for the workplace) apps like gmail, maps, keep, drive etc., while refusing to give your data to ubisoft means 'missing out' on a bunch of mid slop games and an occasional gem. these things are not even comparable and its intellectually disingenuous of you to pretend they are.
Leaving Steam was one of the most wilfully ignorant, baselessly arrogant, profit destroying decisions in corporate history. I lost absolutely all visibility to Ubisoft games other than the constant hyping of upcoming NFT and live service scams (most have failed miserably or been cancelled since, thankfully) so it seemed like scams were all they were producing now.
More how many Metroidvania we got that year. Metroid is slightly different and there are not as many Metroidvania on the switch as you would find on steam. After all they are basically almost as comman as the smut games.
On Nintendo store they can sell Metroidvanai at $60 bc user has no other choice, but you can't do that on Steam which anyone can make better and cheaper Metroidvania to compete.
@mukamuka0 well they have a few but the number is alot smaller. Plus metroid is not a damaged brand. Be honest yea 2D prince of might have how it started but who really remember it that way.
While I generally agree that there is a roof to what price tag a metroidvania can command in the modern game market these days. I feel this more has to do with brand expectations. After the Sands of Time trilogy reinvented a long forgotten IP to make a beloved classic, people (speaking broadly) simply aren’t looking for a side scroller ‘vania out of this IP any more. It doesn’t really matter how good it is, people (again speaking broadly) want an experience more in-line with Sands. Especially since not a single Prince of Persia game since the Sands trilogy has ever managed to deliver to the same level of excellence.
How much of a market for a full AAA priced and produced 2d platformer is there when the Indy market is filling that niche for bargain prices? Ubisoft needs to fire their entire Marketing and Market Research Teams.
Video game companies that are publicly traded should consider sue them citing layoff, how are they supposed to be a successful company and protect investment in them if they have no staff that knows how to make games
Because laying off workers is one of the best ways to increase stock price. Because the stock market and investors don't actually care about the quality of the product or actual value of the company. It's all speculation.
Trying to repair the damage multiple years of wilfully ignorant, profit and visibility destroying, self-exile from Steam has done to everyone's awareness of anything Ubisoft was doing other than massive negative publicity for constantly hyping their future NFT and live service scams.
I work in the gaming industry, whoever "did" the marketing did a crap job. I have never even heard of this game. I know a bunch of people that love this kind of game. Because they share what games are coming out or what they are playing. none of them mentioned this game.
That’s the beautiful thing about capitalism: you can start your own business using relevant experience from a larger company, and directly compete with said company.
i find it annoying how often companies will make a new game, not advertise it at all, and then be surprised that it didn't do well. repeatedly publishers fail their devs and then blame them for the failure. why do competent people lose everything while the inept only ever seem to fall upwards?
The only reason I played that game is cause a friend told me it was up my alley 6 months after it released. And it was a masterpiece. Boo Ubisoft for not marketing the hell out of the game and then punishing the team. They did gods work and the executives let them down.
I have played it and it is one of the best metroidvania ever made with puzzle elements inspired from old school Prince of Persia games. The team did their research on this genre, you can see the attention to detail from gameplay to visual. This is clearly a case of Ubisoft not marketing the game correctly and having unrealistic expectations, the later seems to be a recent trend with AAA studios/publishers
That character design is peak modern dogshit, I just start cringing at this point when I see that haircut with bonus points if it's a girl and the colors are bright blue or pink. I guarantee that most people 1) don't know that's not The Prince and hate the shitty design 2) don't want to play as another character in the PoP franchise. It's not enough to make a good game if the genre itself has very limited appeal as side scrollers do, and for it to have no visible connection to the IP it belongs to.
Kind of Par for the course. They've had other games where they've nearly tripled their investment and still dropped or forgot about and or stated the sales weren't what they expected. It's like they have this weird goal that all of their games have to break records or they aren't worth it.
Metroidvania's are arguably the best video game genre. You can slap any setting an story to a Metroidvania and it would be engaging... The exploration, backtracking for collectables, the combat, platforming and the bosses are often challenging plus memorable... Which is why SotN is still peek to this day.
"... not a big 3D action game which is what most people sadly do associate Prince of Persia with because of those games from the 2000s... " What the hell do you mean SADLY?! The Sands of Time trilogy has to be some of the fondest memories I have from when I was gaming as a teenager. It left such a mark on me, I still have hundreds of screenshots of them saved and fondly remember story beats, the sound effects, the goddamn Dahaka encounters... not to mention the soundtracks. Sure they got their problems but I would wager A LOT more people recall their time with the Sands trilogy than people who know the original 2D platformers even exist. The 2000s Prince is what people connected with. People wanted more of that, more of the Prince, more of the same. It was fun and comfortable even if I now look back with nostalgia. The trilogy will continue to be classics, I will continue to recommend them to people and I'm sure they'll be remembered for far longer than this "modern" facsimile that gamers haven't heard of and care not to find out. I know you probably meant it differently but that comment irked me @BellularNews
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is legitimately a great metroidvania whose only crime was giving Sargon that haircut. This is exactly like Hi-Fi Rush and Tango Gameworks where the team did nothing wrong and made an amazing game but because the people who are at fault are also the ones who hold all the cards, a bunch of genuinely talented people who did everything right are now out of a job. Hopefully they land on their feet somewhere that respects their talent, Lost Crown is one of my favorite games of the year.
That "legitimately great metroidvania" is a bargain bin 9.99 slop. I'm sorry but it just can't hold a candle to many other titles in that genre that aren't nearly as forgettable as this miscreation. There are so many more components that make a great game and being inoffensive on a technical level doesn't magically compensate for (severe) lacks elsewhere.
When actually great games are attempted to be destroyed because some random twitter user or journo's feelings got hurt by something they created for themselves, good games are punished for daring to make a quality title, and bad games are praised for values that don't matter regardless when the other aspects of the game are so bad that any message it carries just becomes negligible… You shouldn't be surprised when corporations do idiotic things, shills do idiotic things, and gamers take a stand at the cost of public rep. Cause if making a quality title isn't enough, then what is?
In my opinion, Beyond Good & Evil 2 reeks of either make-work to keep the devs they really want to keep on-staff busy between their real projects, as a "hook" to keep the niche of fans for the first game invested in Ubisoft, or as a tax-writeoff for some future point when they need the money. The first BG&E was a commercial failure, with only 243k units sold on Steam, and had a gross revenue of just $1.5 million -- sales were so stagnant that it went on sale less than two weeks after it was released. Since then, BG&E2 has had a rotating roster of devs with no consistent leadership or direction. And several of those devs have said in interviews that the game was still just in pre-production as recently as 2021, so there'd be little actual code ready at that time. So yeah, I seriously doubt Ubisoft would divert significant resources from successful franchises like Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy, Far Cry, Star Wars, or Prince of Persia to develop a title that will most likely flop just as badly as the first one did -- especially when they're canning teams that actually HAVE commercial successes, just not as big of a success as Ubisoft wanted.
Alot of people complaining about price but this game launched at a fair price. Since this is ubisoft not many people pay full price i waited a few months and got it for 20 not because i thought it wasn't worth full price but they discount every game almost half off within half a year; so why wouldn't i wait?
I think it's ridiculous that a game can sell a million copies and be considered a "failure." Game companies are way over-spending and making games impossible to be profitable. Feature creep and scoping is delaying projects for 2 or 3x as long as they need to be.
I mean, Ubisoft is still stuck with their dumbass launcher that is objectively prevents you to play games on. So even the games I am actually interested in, I never bought them from Ubisoft.
You know I really wish I made a video about this 3 years ago when I thought of it but I was looking at development trends going on about a couple years ago and I remember realizing that this is going to be the first generation where you're going to have games that are going to come out. That game design wise and production quality wise are extremely well done or are serviceable but that these games will fail not because they sucked or were buggy. But because either the main company did terrible business decisions like marketing or microtransactions that would tank the game or that these companies would be in so much debt because of ballooning budgets that their expectations for games are going to be out of control and thus even if they sell, billions of copies will never recoup their money and thus would be considered a failure. Going to break a lot of the industry's brain because basically it means is you could come out with the game of the year and still have your company disbanded as if you made rise of the robots simply do to the current business climate and poor business decisions that have nothing to do with the actual game itself. I think this is like going to be a big breaking point for a lot in video games outside of I want to say Nintendo.
ghost recon was shafted by trying to convert it to a survival game. nobody wanted to spend 80 to 90% of their time foraging for food and drink. thats not the interesting exciting part of life let alone a game. same thing almost happened to The Division, and then the same exec or whoever it is finally convinced someone to greenlight a survival Division game which i think is now cancelled. until ubisoft find that person and dump a studio on them to make pure survival games for that tiny niche number of players, this sabotage of good IP will continue.
I would love to take a look at ubisofts numbers for r6siege, i can only imagine the millions of "new players" are just the same hackers buying the game over and over after getting banned.
fake prince 2008 felt like a scam but turned out to be a great game actually. The return of main protagonist from trilogy in forgotten sands was great, but the game was buggy af, but still felt good nostalgia playing old prince. Most important thing in POP trilogy is the story (alongside fighting and puzzles), but when you change protagonist it falls apart. Lost crown might be a great platformer but it's less interesting playing some other dude. Add to that non avialability on stea, on launch
Holy crap I'd never seen that Sands of Time remake trailer... no wonder the game got eternally shelved, it's incredible that this shit got made public holy
This reminds me of when Ubisoft launched Beyond Good & Evil. They botched that so hard it pre-emptively killed the franchise before it got off the pad.
I never even heard of the game until recently. Also would probably add to the confusion if you did see it and click it and you don't see well a Prince of Persia in it what the heck it is suppose to even be.
Here's the issue as I see it. I have a backlog longer than I can ever realistically play in my lifetime. And I am only counting games I already own. Not games from subscriptions or games from wishlists I don't own yet. Why would I buy a new game when I haven't gotten around to playing Hollow Knight yet? I usually play games years after release and more often than not get them on sale in those years between release and me actually playing them. My backlog at the time of writing includes 162 games. Most of those are 50+ hour games, and then there are games like Fire Emblem Three Houses that will take me multiple months to finish. I am not someone who suffers from FOMO, so I feel no need to buy games on release, much less preorder. There are exceptions, of course. Most notably, Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree.
Me all the same. When it comes to solo game, i see no reason what so ever to not play it at least one year after release. All the DLC are out, the game is half price, and bugs/balance are fully patched.
Tragic that Ubisoft fumbled this game so hard, as a metroidvania this game is incredibly solid and pretty fun, challenging, but not insanely so. But even as a fan of metroidvanias, having played pretty much every big release as well as quite a few smaller ones, I didn't even hear about this game until it came to steam. that's.... insane how bad they didn't market the game.
Madness. This was not the big game. It was Imo a filler, because sands of time got delayed. But because all else failed, they butcher the team that at least made them a good game. You know what, why not keep the team as is, and just let them help with Beyond good and evil 2? None of those CEO's want to look at Larian. They only whine that it can't be the new standard. But if they came down their high horse just once, they could see that Larian has whole studio's that are focused on one of the pieces that make a game. In Ireland their studio is focused on storytelling, just that. Mocap, writing etc. Crazy, right? But the other AAA studios, believe it's good to break up studio's. Because the numbers count up in their machine minds. But every human being with emotions, knows it can take years to get a smooth working team together. Those CEO's must just start a puppet show, the way they like pulling strings. Let the creative minds create. I still want to see that character creator they built for beyond good and evil 2. The way you could morph in animal features.
Yes Ubi is VERY different to the rest of the industry. No fire and hire cycles, you noticed that. They never had those. Unusually healthy work-life balance culture as well, like remember the catastrophic crunch on Cyberpunk? Something of this kind doesn't happen at Ubi. One other is that outsourcing is minimal and to specialists, not to anonymous sweatshops on the other end of the globe, which make up the bulk of gamedev workforce for other companies; instead the bulk of shifting workload is managed by insourcing, which comes with worker benefits and credit. On the other hand, they can be very rigid and bureaucratic and office-internal politics can degrade into a complete and utter mess of a power struggle instead of people working together for the benefit of the end product quality.
i know it isnt the case but if i was that guy at @11:50 i would double down and start memeing with the names. assastents creed between good and evil Rain man (movie tie in, i think)
At this point, Mainstream Review channels like IGN, Kotaku and others, their ratings are next to meaningless, especially when they are more advertisement than review. On top of that, its a game that was next to never advertised and easily overshadowed by many, many other Ubisoft failures. Along with the troubles Ubisoft is facing now, they will be disbanding even more teams, no matter how good or bad they are, as to that they are largely a failing publisher. So really, I feel next to nothing about losing a team behind already fumbled franchise from a fumbling publisher. What more can be said, the current AAA Developer/Publisher model is failing and hopefully AA and Indie will rise over them soon.
How can their expectations be high when they completely strip the character from what it used to be? The only resemblence this game has to prince of persia is the name of the game. Doesn't mean it's bad. It's just not a prince of persia game.
This character used to be nameless emotionless faceless dude in white onesie... Ever since then there were at least 3 different Princes. I guess correctly youre reffering to the one in Sands of Time trilogy?
I agree. But after Walhalla did we really still had hope? And there are so many cool hairstyles they could go for. The braids in the hair are not even the problem. Lots of braids in old Persian, Assyrian, Babylonian examples. But not like that. Mostly with some headdress, and braids in the back. Not shaved like that. The only place I know of that shaved the head in the back and sides were the Normans. And then we are talking about 1100 AC Normandy France. And only because it was handy to have your head shaved that way, for wearing a helmet.
I really feel like this game was hurt by the fact that Sands of Time Remake got pushed back. If that had released first, i think more people would have been interested in giving this a try.
i actually enjoyed all the PoPs up to now except this new platformer. i played it for 10 minutes when they made it free, but it just wasn't what i want from a PoP game.
The first three prince of persia games made for the ps2 really knocked my socks off. They are still really tight 3d platformers; some of the best games ever made. Modern Ubisoft seems to be suffering from scale decay and skill decay.
I think the biggest point against the game was the Ubisoft name attached to it. A lot of people refuse to buy Ubisoft games because they understandably assume that it's gonna be unfinished and overmonetized shit. It's their best game in a long time, and the only game by them that I have ever bought new for full price (I have bought some AC games either used or heavily discounted). It's also kinda sad that the team got merged into other teams. I was hoping they would get acquired by some other group kinda like what happened with the Hi Fi Rush team so that could actually make another metroidvania cause Lost Crown was great.
Honestly, I think this is a fascinating case of a good game published by a company that basically drives away the game's main target audience, because I can't imagine any metroidvania fan having a good image of Ubisoft and accepting games that requires Ubisoft launcher. PoP The Lost Crown really needed a good and effective marketing campaing to reach and convice its audience, because being associated to Ubisoft is a handicap for any games that isn't aimed at ubisoft openworld games. There is also the fact it was an Epic Store exclusive on PC, on top of that.
something that may have "helped": I was checking and it was released 2 months after blasphemous 2 which means fans of the genre may have skipped this game as they had their belly full at the time. I would assume the team did a great work but Ubisoft doesn't know how to tap in that market, or were too arrogant to recognize the competition.
The problem with Ubisoft execs, and most corporate execs in any company, is they run the business on a Shareholder Primacy model focusing entirely on shareholder value and ignore stakeholder theory. Investers throwing cash into the company do not make great games and resulting profit, the stakeholders do. Stakeholders are employees, suppliers & contractors and also customers. Focus on shareholder value at the exclusion of stakeholders and you will, deservedly, watch the slow decline of your company as key staff leave and morale plummets. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy. Treat your stakeholders with equal importance as you would a shareholder and you have a sustainable business with happy employees creating great quality products or services making customers happy and resulting in shareholders flocking to invest.
I've always told friends that PoP LC has the unfortunate situation of being a game made under the Ubisoft label. There are folks who will refuse to buy any game from Ubisoft regardless of how good it is.
I just finished Nine Sols. That was a metroidvania and a half, and cheap to boot. I have Lost Crown in backlog I plan on playing within next 2 weeks. It has a helluva high bar to live up to, especially considering even with huge discount it was more expensive than Nine Sols was with minor discount. Point is - it may be a known IP, but LC is in the market that is saturated by cheap masterpieces like Hollow Knight, Bloodstained, Nine Sols, Ori, Afterimage... What does LC do so great that Ubi decided they are worth twice the price? Brand name? As if we're not used to out beloved brand names being butchered by now by incompetent new directors. IMO, they needed to sell it cheap, sell it everywhere, and not have Denuvo. Pirates would have brought more paying customers by simply increasing the coverage that it didn't get from marketing.
for the lay off, we should remember that some country like France, have good protection for employee, so ubisoft france can't fire them easily. on another note, Games do most of their sales in the first months, prince of persia got the best launch he could have... in the ubisoft store... of course the sales are not better on steam... it's just to late. the game and the people who worked on it have done their job perfectly, the management and marketing are the one who failed... but the one that get disband are the dev of course... edit : seem that the game was release on epic first, well, better move... but better is not good. lot of game loose a lot of sale because of this deal with epic.
I really wanted to get the game but I don't want to give Ubisoft my money anymore, it released on their launcher that refuses to let me install games without a VPN and when it did release on steam, there was a save bug that broke saves
Ubisoft not firing people won't matter if Shadows flops, because they will either get bought, or literally close down, because I don't think they will have a lot of money left if they don't make any money out of Shadows.
7:00 Nintendo did use to do cheaper rereleases at about -50% of some big hits that hit their gold standard, albeit not as many as Sony did, and while I don't check the Switch store for games that have physical releases, I do think some of their first-party games do get discounts by nearly that much, but it does appear to be a hard limit, certainly nothing dirt cheap from Nintendo ever.
Another day another studio making great game blamed for management failures of the Publisher. Let me guess they made something that falls into interests of niche indie audience, but they expected block buster sales. Ubisoft expects to sell 10 milion copies with every game this one was cheaper, so they probably expected like 5 millions. It could never make that happen.
I enjoyed the game but sampled both this and Outlaws on a 1-month Ubisoft+ subscription. I played $100+ of content for pennies & have no idea how they expect to make money from that service :/
This game was barely marketed, I think I saw like one or two trailers, but they didn't exactly hype me. Especially because Ubisoft was supposedly working on a remake of Sands of time, like with the Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes. I held off on buying this game, until after hearing good news I bought it new, shame to hear the dev team was disbanded, hopefully they can work together on something new. I don't think the Protagonist's design helped, that particularly hairstyle just felt out of place, compared to designs of previous titles. Even the 2008 game looked closer to the Sands of Time Prince, albeit with an excessive amount of fabric on him, which was kind of a trend for awhile back then and in later years. Adding layers of fabric, scarves or bandages on a character I mean.
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Ubisoft is nutcase they should be sold get better developer new team
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@Michael..
1 - France's labour laws prevented Ubisoft from dumping staff after disbanding the POP team. The studio in question was Montepellier, not some place in NA where they could just layoff the entire team otherwise they no doubt would have.
2 - Larian's Publishing Director called Ubisoft out for their business decision to NOT release POP on Steam as they were trying to use it to promote their Store front, there were NO platform fees. Ubisoft sabotaged their own game and IP by trying to force players to the Ubisoft Store / subscription instead of selling their game on Steam and/or Epic. Ubisoft crying that they only sold 300,000 units on the Ubisoft Store tells you how stupid their business people are.
They thought they had more pull than they actually had.
Ubisoft customers are telling the CEO to " get comfortable to not owning your company " in return .
Uuuhhhh On point 2, I actually worked on the game, we released it on Epic game hence exclusivity clause that prevented us from releasing it to steam for a while so I dont know what you are on about ?
@@xefiria6982don't epic pay you for that exclusivity?
Also comparing epic and ubisoft store is like comparing mini market on rural area with huge supermarket inside mall.
Epic has burn a lot of money giving out free game, exclusivity deal for years to gain a lot of audiance.
How many user ubisoft store have? How many epic have?
@ribertfranhanreagen9821 yeah the deal is you get a bunch of money but you dont get to use other plate-forms to distribute your game for a set period of time that you negociate (not including console platforms like you can still sell on the nintendo shop ofc). If you ask me it was a very dumb short term minded decision and the game would have benefited from being on steam day one, but I dont make the calls I am just a game dev.
They didn't market this game at all. Its a genuinely great action metroidvania and now the team is gone.
I don’t buy 50 dollar metroidvanias. I knew about it and said nope.
I didnt buy it solely because its ubisoft. they fired a whole ass team because of their own bs because im not alone in this hatred of them lol
@@apollodingo3583yeah thats fair. When ur competition is Hollow Knight, Blasphemous and Metroid Dread, u need to stay humble.
Bought it, it's not that great.Writing is absolutely atrocious. Gameplay is mediocre. Character designs are okay. There's this pattern that i've noticed of all the new "creatives" obviously haven't had hardships or really lived outside of their city bubble. It's just a copy of a copy. It doesn't convey any human emotions.
Also, its not a "Prince of Persia" game, it just has the name.
@@nahuelkid I’ve heard about the game but Ubisoft said we gamers should be comfortable not owning games. I would pirate Ubisoft games but dei games aren’t worth pirating.
They told us to own nothing and be happy.
So we are telling Ubisoft, no more business and be happy.
If they want to kill their best teams let them, means those best teams can reform and make their own stuff without Ubisoft HR team in the room
Yes they can reform and you still won't buy their game.
Why won't someone think of the monetization director?! 😭😭
@@srdjan455 client austerity will continue until company quality improves
@@srdjan455
He meant "reform as an independent studio" unaffiliated with Ubisoft.
It's not the developers that are the issue, it's the publishers (at least the triple-A publishers).
@Operational117 Is that why nobody bought the game, to stick it to Ubisoft?
"Ubisoft" is going to become a verb...like "Oh man, they just Ubisofted their business", "Wow that singer just Ubisofted his career"
Watching them make games no longer makes me excited, it makes me Ubisoft.
@@Joegengstah Goddamn.
@@bulkvanderhuge9006 It already is a word to describe a genre of games" Ubislop
I'm down for this. Let's do it.
Some time last month, a Ubisoft took place at the intersection between John Smith Street and Lombard's Road.
"ubisofted" would prolly become "ubisof'd" in that case
I think the issue is that Ubisoft has ruined their reputation so much that I just assume all their games are either mid or bad. I don't follow the development of any of their games anymore.
Throwing a tantrum and taking their ball and going home (removing their games from sale on Steam) was the height of baseless arrogance and wilful ignorance, significantly contributing to the collapse of profitability. I hadn't noticed a single Ubisoft release since they left and now that they are back, I couldn't care enough to remember a single release for more than a few seconds after seeing it. Why should I? But the idiots at the top making the worst, greediest, most anti-consumer decisions possible (how many Ubisoft NFT/live service game cancellations now?) will never have to face any real world consequences for their greed and stupidity, all the actual workers have to bear that load on behalf of the brain dead billionaires in charge...
But you're not wrong in your assumptions 😅
If a game i want to buy has Ubisoft anywhere on the steam page i will not buy it, period. The one time i missed it i refunded it.
@@Micromation prince of persia is a great game reminding me of ubisofts best (rayman legends and origins)
@@cooltwittertag I didn't like it. It was the epitome of Ubisoft problems - pretty visuals paired with mediocre gameplay and bad writing. It was overpriced for what it was and just straight out inferior to just about any Metroidvania I've played in the last decade. I honestly wouldn't pick it up for more than £14.99, let alone the £45 they've asked for... Needless to say, the game was down to £17.99 in 3 months after release so sales figures were abysmal. Don't get me wrong, if you've enjoyed it then all the power to you but personally it was a waste of time I would've spent better playing Blasphemous again... Maybe if I didn't play metroidvanias and this was my first game of this type I could've enjoyed it. Maybe 🤔
Nintendo USED to do discounts. Right up through the Wii, you'd see games cut down to $20 and sold as "Player's Choice" label games. That used to be normal for them.
Speaking as an accounting professional, I'm guessing that Nintendo figured out that a smaller number of sales but at $60 a pop (and that $40 being more or less pure profit) had a higher z (as in x units times y net-profit dollars equals z money made from game) than the higher volume of Player's Choice sales. Probably by a significant enough margin to make up for the soft value of bringing in more potential future customers.
I mean, they’re using Nintendo Switch Online to do discounts and stuff, so that’s nice, since you build up gold points for each purpose. But hey, they’ll definitely make enough money considering the fact that the Nintendo Switch Successor is confirmed to be backwards compatible, which will boost the money they get for older Switch games. It’s a smart move.
I've grown tired of these developers wanting every single title to be a breakout hit. It feels like that is all they are shooting for instead of making games that people like and want to keep the wallet fed, then do the breakout stuff along with those.
These days it feels like everyone is just paying billions to hit the same mark and it doesn't work.
Yea, when the companies go 'public' this is what happens. The Shareholders hear about the ridiculous numbers of Fortnite etc ( with their VERY shady practices that needs to be regulated btw ) so they expect EVERY GAME to be that. They think people have infinite money to give when the world economy is getting plunged to the depths.
@@BlueWoWTaylan more importantly, infinite amounts of time. Clearly people who already play massively time consuming games will have the time to squeeze in another game. You can't get "micro" transactions from the guy that didn't pick up the game because it requires more time than they have available or care to spend.
@@Anonymous-zu7dh Yea that too. There is only so many hours in a day for people to squeeze in a game and all these live-service stuff expect themselves to be the one. That is unsustainable
That’s why Nintendo succeeds. They make smash out of the park hits at a decent rate, and they make a bunch of good, usual games to satiate the fans.
@@BlueWoWTaylanits called capitalism
I blame the person that decided to price it at 40 USD when Hollow Knight and other games in the genre range from 15-25 USD.
Literally the only reason for that pricing is like with every single other game they release. They make several tiers of the products, where the base is overpriced and subsequent editions reach level of pure absurdity and then they say you can have all that "value" (even though they haven't released any DLC content to any game in over a decade that is worth anything at all) by simply subscribing to their monthly plan for "attractive" sum of 17,99 a month 😂😂😂 🤷🏻
Metroid was priced higher right? It sold well and on one platform
Whenever a big AAA publisher tries to horn in on a traditionally indie space, they completely fail to understand the consumer they're trying to sell to.
See also Harvestella selling for $60 in a genre where Stardew Valley costs $15 and most games tend to launch between $25 and $30 USD.
@@chrism1966 You see, the thing is, Metroid Dread was a game deserving of that price, and was marketed adequately. Ubisoft has this problem where…. You need a ridiculous amount of money just to buy a console, and they can just take back what you buy. Not to mention they shoot themselves in the foot constantly.
And herein lies the problem of AAA companies making games on less than AAA budgets. The companies think that they are less worthy of marketing if they don’t cost a lot, but they still expect them to move the same amount of units. They are set up to fail unless it’s a live service, which will fail anyway.
The amount of money is irrelevant when bad management is the issue lmao. Look at concord, skull and bones, and other several million or near billion dollar productions that flopped after not even a month of existence. I've had more fun and trust in a game made on a $5 budget than ubislop
"Will be working on Beyond good and evil 2". Oh lord, I have not laughed that hard in a long time...
Ubisoft is bewildered at a game that they barely marketed not selling millions of copies...
Who is in charge over there???
Probably cause Prince of Persia couldn't have a gay twink in it
they didn't want it to sell 😅
Wherever they tried to market it, they got serious clapback.
Someone with a business degree
Well it's ubisoft and as such blacklisted by countless pc players. Their track record of handling their customers is horrible.
Imagine if Betheda decided to not make Oblivion because it would cannibalize the long term sales of Morrowind. What level of coked out MBA spreadsheet monkey do I need to be to understand this logic?
10:25
those teams were situated in France, right? French worker protection laws might be a more plausible reason than wanting to keep the talents... A company as big as Ubisoft can't just fire (French) workers for mistakes made by management, similar to Germany they'd have to consider every milder measure before firing people or pay high severance packages, unless they'd closed the whole studio location, firing everyone unwilling to relocate.
That sucks that it happened. I think Lost Crown had some impressive innovations for a Metroidvania. For example, I really enjoyed how you could mark up the map with notes. Really like how fast it was on top of being acrobatic in platorming. Such a shame this game didn't sell well. I know I bought it when I first saw it come out and didn't regret it at all. Hope that this games gets a cult following or isn't forgotten about because it deserves to be remembered.
For Ubisoft their best team is the one that makes them the most money. I don’t believe any of these companies believe in making great games at the executive level. We’ve seen it time and again now, a game can be great profitable even, but if it doesn’t make enough it’s seen as a failure (look at what happened to Tango).
a game needs to be more than profitable because you need to make enough money to not only recoup the costs of development but to fund the next game
@ My point is that a game can be a success, profitable enough to cover costs and have the funds for the next title and still be considered a failure.
@@dtt719 because for corporation level of profits it's miniscule.
@ Relatively minuscule. It’s also clear that games full of micro/macro transactions have the best RoI. Just look at the amount of money the $90 mount has made. On a reskin of a mount that already existed.
BG3 would likely be seen as a failure with its lack of monetization. Even if adding cosmetics meant hurting their reputation or even losing the sales of some players, the money made off of them would have more than made up for it.
Fun fact, AC 2007 was initially Prince of persia
Some AC mechanics come from PS2 era PoP
i wanted to try the demo for this game on the switch, downloaded it, and found out i had to create a ubisoft account to play the demo. I dipped after that. Not willing to trade personal info/data for a demo. If that roadblock hadn't been there, might have played and enjoyed the demo enough to buy the game. But instead I was turned off by dirty ubisoft and never looked back
While I can very much understand that you arent willing to create an ubisoft account, especially just for a demo, the data argument is quite funny (bad).
You do know who owns this website... right? You either are against it and put this argument down painfully often, or you accept it (while still not liking it) and use services anyway.
But this was just personal preference, not an attempt to protect your data. A decision that doesnt need any more reasons that "Ubisoft sucks". Its a valid point in itself. No need to pretend.
@@LiftandCoa creating a ubisoft account is deciding whether to trade data for the game demo experience and I voted no, it has nothing to do with google or other corps
@@LiftandCoa refusing to give your data to google means missing out on their dozens of extremely useful (and sometimes necessary especially for the workplace) apps like gmail, maps, keep, drive etc., while refusing to give your data to ubisoft means 'missing out' on a bunch of mid slop games and an occasional gem. these things are not even comparable and its intellectually disingenuous of you to pretend they are.
I remember when this game came out ONLY because i remember how shocked I was that I had no idea it was even being made on its release day
Leaving Steam was one of the most wilfully ignorant, baselessly arrogant, profit destroying decisions in corporate history. I lost absolutely all visibility to Ubisoft games other than the constant hyping of upcoming NFT and live service scams (most have failed miserably or been cancelled since, thankfully) so it seemed like scams were all they were producing now.
The glass is always half full Bellular, they no longer work for Ubislop!
They do though. They just got moved to other projects.
I would've purchased Lost Crown happily if it wasn't charged the same price as Elden F Ring on Brazil... >.>
Know your place, know your product.
If you’re not Nintendo you aren’t selling a 2d metroidvania for more than $30
More how many Metroidvania we got that year. Metroid is slightly different and there are not as many Metroidvania on the switch as you would find on steam. After all they are basically almost as comman as the smut games.
On Nintendo store they can sell Metroidvanai at $60 bc user has no other choice, but you can't do that on Steam which anyone can make better and cheaper Metroidvania to compete.
@mukamuka0 well they have a few but the number is alot smaller. Plus metroid is not a damaged brand. Be honest yea 2D prince of might have how it started but who really remember it that way.
While I generally agree that there is a roof to what price tag a metroidvania can command in the modern game market these days. I feel this more has to do with brand expectations.
After the Sands of Time trilogy reinvented a long forgotten IP to make a beloved classic, people (speaking broadly) simply aren’t looking for a side scroller ‘vania out of this IP any more. It doesn’t really matter how good it is, people (again speaking broadly) want an experience more in-line with Sands. Especially since not a single Prince of Persia game since the Sands trilogy has ever managed to deliver to the same level of excellence.
How much of a market for a full AAA priced and produced 2d platformer is there when the Indy market is filling that niche for bargain prices? Ubisoft needs to fire their entire Marketing and Market Research Teams.
Has anyone told you of Super Mario Wonder? Hell even Super Mario Superstars sold well over time, just not as well as Wonder.
@@krspaceT1yeah but this is no Mario or even Metroid 😂😂😂
@@Micromation Exactly.
Video game companies that are publicly traded should consider sue them citing layoff, how are they supposed to be a successful company and protect investment in them if they have no staff that knows how to make games
Because laying off workers is one of the best ways to increase stock price. Because the stock market and investors don't actually care about the quality of the product or actual value of the company. It's all speculation.
This game was a banger of a metroidvania. Such a shame.
I never even heard of this game. What the hell is their marketing team even doing???
Trying to repair the damage multiple years of wilfully ignorant, profit and visibility destroying, self-exile from Steam has done to everyone's awareness of anything Ubisoft was doing other than massive negative publicity for constantly hyping their future NFT and live service scams.
Bioware will also be gutted when they announce Dragon Age hasn't met sales expectations.
Don't threaten me with a good time 😅
I work in the gaming industry, whoever "did" the marketing did a crap job. I have never even heard of this game. I know a bunch of people that love this kind of game. Because they share what games are coming out or what they are playing. none of them mentioned this game.
I bet some of the members of their best team is gonna go indie.
I hope. Either indie or get hired by someone who actually care about their ip. Maybe even Sony since they have no 2d action adventure games at all
and they gonna make some shit games that are market with "from the creators of Prince of Persia".
That’s the beautiful thing about capitalism: you can start your own business using relevant experience from a larger company, and directly compete with said company.
i find it annoying how often companies will make a new game, not advertise it at all, and then be surprised that it didn't do well. repeatedly publishers fail their devs and then blame them for the failure. why do competent people lose everything while the inept only ever seem to fall upwards?
The only reason I played that game is cause a friend told me it was up my alley 6 months after it released. And it was a masterpiece.
Boo Ubisoft for not marketing the hell out of the game and then punishing the team. They did gods work and the executives let them down.
I have played it and it is one of the best metroidvania ever made with puzzle elements inspired from old school Prince of Persia games.
The team did their research on this genre, you can see the attention to detail from gameplay to visual.
This is clearly a case of Ubisoft not marketing the game correctly and having unrealistic expectations, the later seems to be a recent trend with AAA studios/publishers
That character design is peak modern dogshit, I just start cringing at this point when I see that haircut with bonus points if it's a girl and the colors are bright blue or pink.
I guarantee that most people 1) don't know that's not The Prince and hate the shitty design 2) don't want to play as another character in the PoP franchise.
It's not enough to make a good game if the genre itself has very limited appeal as side scrollers do, and for it to have no visible connection to the IP it belongs to.
Kind of Par for the course. They've had other games where they've nearly tripled their investment and still dropped or forgot about and or stated the sales weren't what they expected. It's like they have this weird goal that all of their games have to break records or they aren't worth it.
Metroidvania's are arguably the best video game genre. You can slap any setting an story to a Metroidvania and it would be engaging... The exploration, backtracking for collectables, the combat, platforming and the bosses are often challenging plus memorable... Which is why SotN is still peek to this day.
"... not a big 3D action game which is what most people sadly do associate Prince of Persia with because of those games from the 2000s... "
What the hell do you mean SADLY?! The Sands of Time trilogy has to be some of the fondest memories I have from when I was gaming as a teenager. It left such a mark on me, I still have hundreds of screenshots of them saved and fondly remember story beats, the sound effects, the goddamn Dahaka encounters... not to mention the soundtracks. Sure they got their problems but I would wager A LOT more people recall their time with the Sands trilogy than people who know the original 2D platformers even exist. The 2000s Prince is what people connected with.
People wanted more of that, more of the Prince, more of the same. It was fun and comfortable even if I now look back with nostalgia. The trilogy will continue to be classics, I will continue to recommend them to people and I'm sure they'll be remembered for far longer than this "modern" facsimile that gamers haven't heard of and care not to find out.
I know you probably meant it differently but that comment irked me @BellularNews
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is legitimately a great metroidvania whose only crime was giving Sargon that haircut. This is exactly like Hi-Fi Rush and Tango Gameworks where the team did nothing wrong and made an amazing game but because the people who are at fault are also the ones who hold all the cards, a bunch of genuinely talented people who did everything right are now out of a job.
Hopefully they land on their feet somewhere that respects their talent, Lost Crown is one of my favorite games of the year.
they are not out of a job. They just aren't doing the job they wanted to do now.
That "legitimately great metroidvania" is a bargain bin 9.99 slop. I'm sorry but it just can't hold a candle to many other titles in that genre that aren't nearly as forgettable as this miscreation. There are so many more components that make a great game and being inoffensive on a technical level doesn't magically compensate for (severe) lacks elsewhere.
When actually great games are attempted to be destroyed because some random twitter user or journo's feelings got hurt by something they created for themselves, good games are punished for daring to make a quality title, and bad games are praised for values that don't matter regardless when the other aspects of the game are so bad that any message it carries just becomes negligible…
You shouldn't be surprised when corporations do idiotic things, shills do idiotic things, and gamers take a stand at the cost of public rep. Cause if making a quality title isn't enough, then what is?
In my opinion, Beyond Good & Evil 2 reeks of either make-work to keep the devs they really want to keep on-staff busy between their real projects, as a "hook" to keep the niche of fans for the first game invested in Ubisoft, or as a tax-writeoff for some future point when they need the money.
The first BG&E was a commercial failure, with only 243k units sold on Steam, and had a gross revenue of just $1.5 million -- sales were so stagnant that it went on sale less than two weeks after it was released. Since then, BG&E2 has had a rotating roster of devs with no consistent leadership or direction. And several of those devs have said in interviews that the game was still just in pre-production as recently as 2021, so there'd be little actual code ready at that time.
So yeah, I seriously doubt Ubisoft would divert significant resources from successful franchises like Assassin's Creed, Tom Clancy, Far Cry, Star Wars, or Prince of Persia to develop a title that will most likely flop just as badly as the first one did -- especially when they're canning teams that actually HAVE commercial successes, just not as big of a success as Ubisoft wanted.
Casual games for casual crowds, they won't hunt down the platform you release on.
Alot of people complaining about price but this game launched at a fair price. Since this is ubisoft not many people pay full price i waited a few months and got it for 20 not because i thought it wasn't worth full price but they discount every game almost half off within half a year; so why wouldn't i wait?
I really like your coverage. Gives me good vibes and informs me about the industry. Good stuff.
Why didn't it sell well? Ubisoft is attached to it. I'll never touch another game with their taint on it, and im doubtful im alone.
I think it's ridiculous that a game can sell a million copies and be considered a "failure." Game companies are way over-spending and making games impossible to be profitable. Feature creep and scoping is delaying projects for 2 or 3x as long as they need to be.
Its not even like you can't tell that games take a while to rise up. Hell, Sparks of Hope is a game like that. Ubisoft has that very example to use.
They didnt fire them but they joined another team
I mean, Ubisoft is still stuck with their dumbass launcher that is objectively prevents you to play games on. So even the games I am actually interested in, I never bought them from Ubisoft.
You know I really wish I made a video about this 3 years ago when I thought of it but I was looking at development trends going on about a couple years ago and I remember realizing that this is going to be the first generation where you're going to have games that are going to come out. That game design wise and production quality wise are extremely well done or are serviceable but that these games will fail not because they sucked or were buggy. But because either the main company did terrible business decisions like marketing or microtransactions that would tank the game or that these companies would be in so much debt because of ballooning budgets that their expectations for games are going to be out of control and thus even if they sell, billions of copies will never recoup their money and thus would be considered a failure. Going to break a lot of the industry's brain because basically it means is you could come out with the game of the year and still have your company disbanded as if you made rise of the robots simply do to the current business climate and poor business decisions that have nothing to do with the actual game itself. I think this is like going to be a big breaking point for a lot in video games outside of I want to say Nintendo.
ghost recon was shafted by trying to convert it to a survival game. nobody wanted to spend 80 to 90% of their time foraging for food and drink. thats not the interesting exciting part of life let alone a game. same thing almost happened to The Division, and then the same exec or whoever it is finally convinced someone to greenlight a survival Division game which i think is now cancelled. until ubisoft find that person and dump a studio on them to make pure survival games for that tiny niche number of players, this sabotage of good IP will continue.
I would love to take a look at ubisofts numbers for r6siege, i can only imagine the millions of "new players" are just the same hackers buying the game over and over after getting banned.
For a company selling video games Ubisoft have become terrible at selling video games.
fake prince 2008 felt like a scam but turned out to be a great game actually. The return of main protagonist from trilogy in forgotten sands was great, but the game was buggy af, but still felt good nostalgia playing old prince. Most important thing in POP trilogy is the story (alongside fighting and puzzles), but when you change protagonist it falls apart. Lost crown might be a great platformer but it's less interesting playing some other dude. Add to that non avialability on stea, on launch
Holy crap I'd never seen that Sands of Time remake trailer... no wonder the game got eternally shelved, it's incredible that this shit got made public holy
A new 3D Rayman game would be nice
imagine making a prince of persia game where main character isnt persian and have dreadlocks and get surprised its failed ?
Ahh I’m sure Persians had dreadlocks. Looks amazing
This reminds me of when Ubisoft launched Beyond Good & Evil. They botched that so hard it pre-emptively killed the franchise before it got off the pad.
i didn't even hear about this game until you covered it just recently, probably why it didn't sell well
I never even heard of the game until recently. Also would probably add to the confusion if you did see it and click it and you don't see well a Prince of Persia in it what the heck it is suppose to even be.
Here's the issue as I see it. I have a backlog longer than I can ever realistically play in my lifetime. And I am only counting games I already own. Not games from subscriptions or games from wishlists I don't own yet. Why would I buy a new game when I haven't gotten around to playing Hollow Knight yet?
I usually play games years after release and more often than not get them on sale in those years between release and me actually playing them. My backlog at the time of writing includes 162 games. Most of those are 50+ hour games, and then there are games like Fire Emblem Three Houses that will take me multiple months to finish.
I am not someone who suffers from FOMO, so I feel no need to buy games on release, much less preorder. There are exceptions, of course. Most notably, Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree.
Me all the same. When it comes to solo game, i see no reason what so ever to not play it at least one year after release. All the DLC are out, the game is half price, and bugs/balance are fully patched.
Marketing does a terrible Job at telling you, where is the value of a metroidvania to be sold at AAA price?
Tragic that Ubisoft fumbled this game so hard, as a metroidvania this game is incredibly solid and pretty fun, challenging, but not insanely so.
But even as a fan of metroidvanias, having played pretty much every big release as well as quite a few smaller ones, I didn't even hear about this game until it came to steam. that's.... insane how bad they didn't market the game.
The best game to play on a steamdeck not available on Steam.
Madness. This was not the big game. It was Imo a filler, because sands of time got delayed. But because all else failed, they butcher the team that at least made them a good game. You know what, why not keep the team as is, and just let them help with Beyond good and evil 2? None of those CEO's want to look at Larian. They only whine that it can't be the new standard. But if they came down their high horse just once, they could see that Larian has whole studio's that are focused on one of the pieces that make a game. In Ireland their studio is focused on storytelling, just that. Mocap, writing etc. Crazy, right? But the other AAA studios, believe it's good to break up studio's. Because the numbers count up in their machine minds. But every human being with emotions, knows it can take years to get a smooth working team together. Those CEO's must just start a puppet show, the way they like pulling strings. Let the creative minds create. I still want to see that character creator they built for beyond good and evil 2. The way you could morph in animal features.
I hadn't even heard of this game up until now. It looks pretty good though and I will check it out.
Yes Ubi is VERY different to the rest of the industry. No fire and hire cycles, you noticed that. They never had those. Unusually healthy work-life balance culture as well, like remember the catastrophic crunch on Cyberpunk? Something of this kind doesn't happen at Ubi.
One other is that outsourcing is minimal and to specialists, not to anonymous sweatshops on the other end of the globe, which make up the bulk of gamedev workforce for other companies; instead the bulk of shifting workload is managed by insourcing, which comes with worker benefits and credit.
On the other hand, they can be very rigid and bureaucratic and office-internal politics can degrade into a complete and utter mess of a power struggle instead of people working together for the benefit of the end product quality.
i know it isnt the case but if i was that guy at @11:50 i would double down and start memeing with the names.
assastents creed
between good and evil
Rain man (movie tie in, i think)
At this point, Mainstream Review channels like IGN, Kotaku and others, their ratings are next to meaningless, especially when they are more advertisement than review. On top of that, its a game that was next to never advertised and easily overshadowed by many, many other Ubisoft failures. Along with the troubles Ubisoft is facing now, they will be disbanding even more teams, no matter how good or bad they are, as to that they are largely a failing publisher.
So really, I feel next to nothing about losing a team behind already fumbled franchise from a fumbling publisher. What more can be said, the current AAA Developer/Publisher model is failing and hopefully AA and Indie will rise over them soon.
How can their expectations be high when they completely strip the character from what it used to be? The only resemblence this game has to prince of persia is the name of the game. Doesn't mean it's bad. It's just not a prince of persia game.
Why does he have the Killmonger. That's not a normal Hairstyle for Iranians let alone Older Persian empire.
@@BlueBDno art direction consistency whatsoever
This character used to be nameless emotionless faceless dude in white onesie... Ever since then there were at least 3 different Princes. I guess correctly youre reffering to the one in Sands of Time trilogy?
Well, I guess they saw that worked with AC and tried with POP
I agree. But after Walhalla did we really still had hope? And there are so many cool hairstyles they could go for. The braids in the hair are not even the problem. Lots of braids in old Persian, Assyrian, Babylonian examples. But not like that. Mostly with some headdress, and braids in the back. Not shaved like that. The only place I know of that shaved the head in the back and sides were the Normans. And then we are talking about 1100 AC Normandy France. And only because it was handy to have your head shaved that way, for wearing a helmet.
I really feel like this game was hurt by the fact that Sands of Time Remake got pushed back. If that had released first, i think more people would have been interested in giving this a try.
Take a well known charactor, blackwash him, then be surprized when people dont want to buy your game....
i actually enjoyed all the PoPs up to now except this new platformer. i played it for 10 minutes when they made it free, but it just wasn't what i want from a PoP game.
The first three prince of persia games made for the ps2 really knocked my socks off. They are still really tight 3d platformers; some of the best games ever made. Modern Ubisoft seems to be suffering from scale decay and skill decay.
I think the biggest point against the game was the Ubisoft name attached to it. A lot of people refuse to buy Ubisoft games because they understandably assume that it's gonna be unfinished and overmonetized shit.
It's their best game in a long time, and the only game by them that I have ever bought new for full price (I have bought some AC games either used or heavily discounted).
It's also kinda sad that the team got merged into other teams. I was hoping they would get acquired by some other group kinda like what happened with the Hi Fi Rush team so that could actually make another metroidvania cause Lost Crown was great.
Honestly, I think this is a fascinating case of a good game published by a company that basically drives away the game's main target audience, because I can't imagine any metroidvania fan having a good image of Ubisoft and accepting games that requires Ubisoft launcher. PoP The Lost Crown really needed a good and effective marketing campaing to reach and convice its audience, because being associated to Ubisoft is a handicap for any games that isn't aimed at ubisoft openworld games.
There is also the fact it was an Epic Store exclusive on PC, on top of that.
something that may have "helped": I was checking and it was released 2 months after blasphemous 2 which means fans of the genre may have skipped this game as they had their belly full at the time. I would assume the team did a great work but Ubisoft doesn't know how to tap in that market, or were too arrogant to recognize the competition.
Ubislop should own nothing and be happy.
The problem with Ubisoft execs, and most corporate execs in any company, is they run the business on a Shareholder Primacy model focusing entirely on shareholder value and ignore stakeholder theory. Investers throwing cash into the company do not make great games and resulting profit, the stakeholders do. Stakeholders are employees, suppliers & contractors and also customers. Focus on shareholder value at the exclusion of stakeholders and you will, deservedly, watch the slow decline of your company as key staff leave and morale plummets. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy. Treat your stakeholders with equal importance as you would a shareholder and you have a sustainable business with happy employees creating great quality products or services making customers happy and resulting in shareholders flocking to invest.
I've always told friends that PoP LC has the unfortunate situation of being a game made under the Ubisoft label. There are folks who will refuse to buy any game from Ubisoft regardless of how good it is.
Ubisoft: the perfect and unifying example of how to fumble the bag constantly
Oh no!
After years of very obvious bias, noone takes the journalists word seriously?
How could this be?
Who is paying $40 for a Metroidvania? Be serious Ubisoft.
Lots of people, but not enough
Everyone who bought dread
Metroid fans: Hi
Only Nintendorks.
@MundaneThingsBackwards hence the "not enough"
I just finished Nine Sols. That was a metroidvania and a half, and cheap to boot. I have Lost Crown in backlog I plan on playing within next 2 weeks. It has a helluva high bar to live up to, especially considering even with huge discount it was more expensive than Nine Sols was with minor discount.
Point is - it may be a known IP, but LC is in the market that is saturated by cheap masterpieces like Hollow Knight, Bloodstained, Nine Sols, Ori, Afterimage... What does LC do so great that Ubi decided they are worth twice the price? Brand name? As if we're not used to out beloved brand names being butchered by now by incompetent new directors.
IMO, they needed to sell it cheap, sell it everywhere, and not have Denuvo. Pirates would have brought more paying customers by simply increasing the coverage that it didn't get from marketing.
at least they didnt get fired
for the lay off, we should remember that some country like France, have good protection for employee, so ubisoft france can't fire them easily.
on another note, Games do most of their sales in the first months, prince of persia got the best launch he could have... in the ubisoft store... of course the sales are not better on steam... it's just to late.
the game and the people who worked on it have done their job perfectly, the management and marketing are the one who failed... but the one that get disband are the dev of course...
edit : seem that the game was release on epic first, well, better move... but better is not good. lot of game loose a lot of sale because of this deal with epic.
Gee, Ubisoft gets major wakeup call and yet continues to be absolute shit. Who could have predicted that?
I really wanted to get the game but I don't want to give Ubisoft my money anymore, it released on their launcher that refuses to let me install games without a VPN and when it did release on steam, there was a save bug that broke saves
Different day, different game, different dev team, same news.
Ubisoft not firing people won't matter if Shadows flops, because they will either get bought, or literally close down, because I don't think they will have a lot of money left if they don't make any money out of Shadows.
*Get comfortable with not owning your business!!*
Imagine an Assassins Creed X Prince Of Persia crossover, they're both Ubisoft IP's and as mentioned in the video it was the original concept
Do not forget! When this game was coming out is when Ubisoft told us to not get used to owning our games. This was clearly our response...
Expectations dangerously low
7:00 Nintendo did use to do cheaper rereleases at about -50% of some big hits that hit their gold standard, albeit not as many as Sony did, and while I don't check the Switch store for games that have physical releases, I do think some of their first-party games do get discounts by nearly that much, but it does appear to be a hard limit, certainly nothing dirt cheap from Nintendo ever.
Another day another studio making great game blamed for management failures of the Publisher.
Let me guess they made something that falls into interests of niche indie audience, but they expected block buster sales.
Ubisoft expects to sell 10 milion copies with every game this one was cheaper, so they probably expected like 5 millions. It could never make that happen.
I enjoyed the game but sampled both this and Outlaws on a 1-month Ubisoft+ subscription. I played $100+ of content for pennies & have no idea how they expect to make money from that service :/
I am not a huge Unisoft fan but this sad to hear.
This game was barely marketed, I think I saw like one or two trailers, but they didn't exactly hype me. Especially because Ubisoft was supposedly working on a remake of Sands of time, like with the Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes. I held off on buying this game, until after hearing good news I bought it new, shame to hear the dev team was disbanded, hopefully they can work together on something new. I don't think the Protagonist's design helped, that particularly hairstyle just felt out of place, compared to designs of previous titles. Even the 2008 game looked closer to the Sands of Time Prince, albeit with an excessive amount of fabric on him, which was kind of a trend for awhile back then and in later years.
Adding layers of fabric, scarves or bandages on a character I mean.
I didn't even know about this game until now XD
@4:24 Here's your why: "Warning: This title uses 3rd-party DRM (Ubisoft Connect, Denuvo Anti-Tamper)."