Baldur’s Gate 3 exec says Ubisoft is to blame for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown selling poorly

The director of publishing at Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian says Ubisoft management is to blame for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown selling below expectations.

In a post on X (as spotted by 80 Level), Michael Douse suggested that the game’s relative failure wasn’t down to the development team’s work, but to Ubisoft management.

Douse said that Ubisoft should have released the game on Steam on day one, rather than seven months later. Instead, the PC version launched on the Epic Games Store and the Ubisoft Store, which Douse says would have been underused by players at the time.

“The last notable game on their platform was arguably Far Cry 6 in 2021,” he explained. “The Crew, Mirage and Avatar came in 2023 and didn’t perform, so you can assume subscriptions were at a lull when Prince of Persia 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.”

Douse added that given the critical success of the game, which ended up with a Metacritic score of 85-87 depending on format, would have led to better sales had Ubisoft released it on Steam at launch.

“It’s such a broken strategy,” he wrote. “The hardest thing is to make an 85+ game – it is much, much easier to release one. It just shouldn’t be done as it was.”

Ubisoft confirmed reports earlier this week that it had disbanded the team responsible for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and moved them to other projects.

The report claimed that the game’s initial sales were lower than expected, meaning any possibility of a sequel was effectively ended within weeks of the first game’s release.

According to the report, some members of the development team pitched a sequel, which turned into a pitch for two DLC expansions instead. It also claims that Ubisoft’s justification for rejecting the sequel pitch was that the release of a sequel would cannibalise sales of the original game, which were already lower than expected.