The first couple of months of a new year are usually when we're afforded the opportunity to catch up with all the games we missed the year before, or to just play something that has been sitting in our backlog for longer than we can remember. With the number of great games big and small that were released in 2023, we needed that time to catch up more than ever. The industry wasn't having it though, dropping a handful of fantastic games in our laps before we'd even made it out of January.
The first of those was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. I expected it to be a solid offering in a long-dormant series, but not anything that would blow me away. How wrong I was. Ubisoft is surprisingly good at Metroidvanias, and the Prince of Persia setting is the perfect backdrop. While many spent their time on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Persona 3 Reload, The Lost Crown managed to blow the Game of the Year discussion wide open despite bei🦂ng the first major release of the year.
What those of us celebrating The Lost Crown's genius didn't realize, however, is we were singing its praises inside of a bubble, and a pretty small bubble at that. The newest Prince of Persia sold just 300,000 copies out of the gate. Worrying numbers from a publisher the size of Ubisoft, but it looks even worse compared to the surprise hit Palworld which boasted 19 million players༺ during the same period.
Between Palworld releasing on the same day and others waiting for the heavy-hitting triple-As coming in the weeks that followed, The Lost Crown was ironically lost in the noise. A real gut punch since it represents so many things the video game industry needs more of. Simple yet layered and well thought-out mechanics, a single-player experience with no live service elements, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:an onus on gameplay over graphics, although the game still looks great.
It felt like we were all collectively yelling, ‘Hey, yeah, this. Give us more of this,’ to the games industry, and while that may have been true, there were fewer of us than I thought. It reminds me of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guardians of the Galaxy – the underperforming game, not the blockbuster MCU trilogy. The year after 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Avengers tried to wedge a live service model into the superhero genre, Guardians of the Galaxy was released. A single-player, story-driven Marvel game that ranks right up there with the Arkham trilogy and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Insomniac's Spider-Man games. Again, I assumed everyone was on the Guardians ride with me. Fast forward a few months and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix revealed the game hadn't sold as well as it expected.
As Square desperately tried to patch up Avengers, many of us pointed to Guardians, like The Lost Crown, and asked for more. However, since it underperformed, not only is it unlikely Guardians of the Galaxy will ever get a sequel, but Square, and other studios, will be reluctant to try anything like it again. The Lost Crown feels⭕ like it is headed in the same direction. Between 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Outlaws, making sure 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Skull And Bones is a success, and more 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin's Creed games than I can keep track of, Ubisoft is spinning a lot of plates right now. If one of those platesౠ sells significantly less than the others, Ubisoft will gladly let it drop so it can shift its focus to everything else.
Guardian🌸s of the Galaxy developer Eidos Montrea♛l was sold to Embracer, so it looks even more unlikely we’ll ever get a sequel.
Maybe it’s too early to say whether The Lost Crown is a failure and its sales will be far more promising and convince Ubisoft we actually do want more of this. Not just more of Sargon, not even just more Metroidvanias, but more of something different. Fingers crossed that, like I originally planned, people are saving The Lost Crown for later in the year. At the very least, don't forget The Lost Crown when it comes to your Game of the Year rankings ten months from now. Prepare yourselves to hear “That was this year?” a lot when the time comes as all of a sudden there's a lot more to come in 2024, and having launched in January, and apparently not played by many, the latest Prince of Persia game will likely be forgotten all too quickly.
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