We lovedPrince of Persia: The Lost Crownhere at DualShockers, with our Jeffy giving the gamea glowing review, before declaring that it shouldpave the way for triple-A developers to dabble more in the Metroidvania genre, which has for years now been best represented through the indie scene. But, as a long-suffering fan of immersive sims myself (RIP Deus Ex), I’m all too aware of the fact that critical plaudits and all-round glowing praise do not necessarily add up to good sales, which ultimately is what’s needed if a certain franchise/creative direction/trend is to take hold.
That seems to be what’s going in with The Lost Crown, which according to a report fromInsider Gaming(via Game Rant), has only clocked 300,000 sales and $15 million in revenue.
I think The Lost Crown’s struggles are twofold. First up, with all thebest Metroidvaniasof recent years being indie games, they tend to costwa-hayless than just about anything Ubisoft puts out; just take a look at the amount of quality to be found in our list ofbest Metroidvanias for under $15—there are some bona fide all-time classics in there! This has established a certain expectation for how much a Metroidvania should cost, so when Ubisoft comes along with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and slaps an almost triple-A $50 price tag on it, from a consumer’s perspective the expense seems hard to justify.
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The Prince Has Lost His Crown
Yes, The Lost Crown is a great game with almost certainly a bigger budget than any of the indies linked above. But playing it, are you really going tofeelthat budgetary difference? Does it actually look better than, say, Blasphemous or Ori and the Will of the Wisps? Is the world design better than Hollow Knight? Sure, it has a lot more going on in terms of voice-acting and cutscenes, but these aren’t really the defining features of a Metroidvania game, and feel like tangential touches in the scheme of things. These aren’t the things that are ultimately going to attract fans of the genre.
Prince of Persia is a venerable IP, particularly among us silver-haired gaming historians, but it really isn’t a modern IP.
Then there is the matter of IP, which comes back to my ruminations on when it’s best to leave an IP be and branch off into something new (I still secretly hope that the supposed Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake ends up being just ‘Black Flag,’a new open-world pirate IP separated from the Assassin’s Creed nonsense). Prince of Persia is a venerable IP in gaming history, particularly among us silver-haired gaming historians, but it really isn’t a modern IP; the last major Prince of Persia release was over a decade ago, and the series arguably hasn’t enjoyed major success since the early 2000s with the Sands of Time trilogy.
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Simply put: it seems like it’s been a long time since gamers en masse reallycaredabout Prince of Persia, and neither you, nor I, nor The Lost Crown, nor Jake Gyllenhaal in the terrible 2010 movie can do anything to change. Frankly, I think when people see that a side-scrolling Prince of Persia game has been released, their eyes glaze over, and they swiftly move on.
A Hard Sell
At this moment in time, it’s a pretty old-hat IP, which perhaps wouldn’t be the case had Ubisoft released that much-delayed Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake first and it had made a splash. Had that happened, The Lost Crown—stuck in an awkward liminal space between indie and triple-A—would’ve had the leverage of a much bigger game to back it up. Reviving a long-dormant series with a game that feels like a spin-off was a bold move that doesn’t seem to be paying off for Ubisoft.
I can’t help but think The Lost Crown would’ve been better off as some silly Assassin’s Creed spin-off, or better still a new IP altogether. Why cling to the old when there’s so muchnewjust waiting to be manifested? Me personally, I’m intrigued by The Lost Crown, but am going to wait until it drops down below the $20 threshold. After all, there are so many great Metroidvanias to play at that price anyway.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
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