Larian director of publishing Michael Douse, never one to be shy about speaking his mind, has spoken his mind about Ubisoft’s decision to disband the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown development team, saying it’s the result of a “broken strategy” that prioritizes subscriptions over sales.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is quite good. PC Gamer’s Mollie Taylor felt it was dragged down by a very slow start, calling it “a slow burn to a fault” in an overall positive review, and it holds an enviable 86 aggregate score on Metacritic. Despite that, Ubisoft recently confirmed that the development team has been scattered to the four winds to work on “other projects that will benefit from their expertise.”
This, Douse feels, is at least partially the outcome of Ubisoft’s focus on subscriptions over conventional game sales—the whole “feeling comfortable with not owning your game” thing espoused by Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay earlier this year—and the decision to stop releasing games on Steam, which is far and away the biggest digital storefront for PC gaming.
I mean given the massive industry layoffs over the past few years developers are already pretty used to not having jobs.
I hate how developers are the ones attributed to game industry problems. Decisions like this almost never fall on the developers shoulders, specifically the ownership quote was from their subscription service director. You know… the guy whose job depends on you not wanting to own games.
Gamers be like “We don’t mind not owning our games as long as we don’t own them through the monopoly that we like, ok?”
Valve has a good track record, and you’ve never owned a game in your life. They’ve always been a license, with few exceptions. Even physical media.
The difference being that I can resell a physical media, even at a profit if there’s enough demand for it, and to most people that’s the definition of ownership.
