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Despite critical success, Ubisoft has disbanded the team behind Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. A sequel was reportedly proposed but rejected so that the team can splinter off to help develop other projects.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team splits to aid in other projects

According to French journalist Gautoz’s sources at Ubisoft Montpellier, the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team has disbanded and will continue work on other Ubisoft projects. A summary on ResetEra from Arubedo states the game’s fate was decided just weeks after release and the teams time together would come to an end after releasing its DLC.

The summary also states that a few members proposed a Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown sequel, as well as a second expansion, but were denied both due to it not meeting sales expectations. It is also reported that the team was told from higher ups that releasing a sequel would cannibalize the long term sales of the initial release.

The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team were reportedly very proud of their work on the metroidvania. A translated post from Gautoz says three or four developers stated it was “the best production of my life.” It also said it was a “rehabilitation zone” for those burnt out on Beyond Good & Evil 2 development.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was revealed during Summer Game Fest 2023 and launched in January 2024. It was critically received favorably with an 86 on Metacritic. It also released DLC titled Mask of Darkness which introduced a new area to the game.

The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team’s disbandment is pretty odd considering it is one of Ubisoft’s more recent successes critically. From the outside looking in, it seemed like it wasn’t marketed as well as it could have. Not bringing the game to Steam at launch also seemed like a pretty big misstep for garnering sales. Along with the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake rebooting development, things aren’t looking to bright for the classic franchise.

(Source: Gautoz, ResetEra)

Circana’s Mat Piscatella has revealed that the disc-based version of the PS5 accounts for a whopping 82% of all life-to-date sales of Sony’s current-generation console in the US.

While the Digital-Only Edition of the PS5 only makes up 18% of total sales, the upcoming PS5 Pro does not ship with a disc drive, presumably in an effort to keep costs down — the console is $699.99/£699.99, after all. If you want to play physical media, you have to purchase the separate Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive; the same can be said for the PS5 Slim Digital Edition.

Not everyone thinks Denuvo DRM is a crime against PC gaming, but you'd probably struggle to find a PC gamer who says they like the anti-piracy software. And why should they? If it works properly, the only people who should notice the existence of Denuvo DRM are the software pirates trying to crack it. Everyone else is free to hate it—because they think it hurts performance, or just because they don't like DRM—or have no feelings about it at all.

That's been the status quo for a long time, but Denuvo is finally pushing back on gamers who characterize it as the Lex Luthor of PC gaming, and says that not only should we not hate it, we should appreciate Denuvo DRM for the good it does for game developers.

"It even breaks my heart a bit to see how our solutions, especially the anti-piracy solution, are picked up by the community," Denuvo product manager Andreas Ullmann told me earlier this year at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. "Because I think it's not fully understood the benefits that our solution can bring, because preventing piracy, you earn more through your game, which is then reinvested into making greater games. I don't have any proof for it, but probably, if our solution does not exist, maybe there are some great games that never get developed."

I had been talking to Ullmann about a new security measure Denuvo is offering for pre-release game builds—interesting, but not very relevant to the typical PC gamer—and sorted the comment away in my mental file of interesting threads to follow up on. As it turns out, that comment foreshadowed a new effort by Denuvo to bring PC gamers over to its side, which kicked off with a Discord server last week (it didn't go well) and an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun this week, in which Ullmann expanded on his personal quest to improve Denuvo's rep.

In the RPS interview, Ullmann describes the Steam forums as a "very toxic, very hostile environment" and says that Denuvo no longer wants to let the crowd make claims about its software unchecked. The company has been adamant that its DRM does not hurt game performance, except in rare cases such as Tekken 7, where the problem was due to an error. (Our results have lost relevance because of their age, but when Durante tested Final Fantasy 15 performance for us with and without Denuvo DRM in 2018, we found no difference.)

On why Denuvo has such a negative reputation if it doesn't hurt performance, Ullmann told RPS that it's in part because it "simply works" and would-be pirates are trying to make it unattractive to game publishers by disparaging it.

"Pirates cannot play games which are using our solution over quite long time periods, usually until the publisher decides to patch out our solution," he said. "So there is a huge community, a lot of people on this planet who are not able to play their favorite videogames, because they are not willing to pay for them, and therefore they have a lot of time to spend in communities and share their view and try to blame Denuvo for a lot of things—trying to make the gaming publishers to not use our solutions so they can start playing pirate copies of games for free again."

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The other reason, Ullmann thinks, is that there just isn't a clear reason for gamers to like Denuvo: All they know is that it's a tool big publishers use to combat piracy so they can make more money. But he argues that with today's giant budgets, a 20% loss of launch revenue—which is what a recent study claims Denuvo DRM protects—is a significant setback.

In the RPS interview, Ullmann also discusses why Denuvo hasn't debunked performance claims with its own testing—the short answer is that it would need permission from its clients, no one would believe it anyway, and there has been some independent testing already (he pointed to our own Final Fantasy 15 test as one example).

As for why he wants to change the perception of Denuvo now, Ullmann reiterated what he told me back in March: Aside from the obvious goal of attracting more business, it's personal.

"I'm with the company for such a long time," said Ullmann. "The guys here are like my family, because a lot of the others here are also here for ages. It just hurts to see what's posted out there about us, even though it has been claimed wrong for hundreds of times."

Today, publishers who use Denuvo often employ it during the critical launch period, and then remove it later with a patch. The upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard will somewhat surprisingly not use Denuvo at all, although EA says that it won't offer preloading as a result.

Image credit: Microsoft


News by Tom Phillips | Editor-in-Chief
Published on Oct. 25, 2024

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella will earn a wallet-busting $79.1m (£60.9m) this financial year, up 63 percent on his compensation for 2023.

The huge boost to Nadella's pay in both cash and stock, announced by Microsoft last night, comes after a positive year overall for the company's financial revenues - but a turbulent 12 months for its employees.

2024 has seen two mass layoffs at Microsoft, with 1900 staff laid off in January, before a further 650 Xbox employees were shown the door in September.

Regardless, Microsoft's shares are up and the company's market value is now higher than $3tn, as it works to capitalise on the rise of AI.

Microsoft moved to shut down three Bethesda gaming studios in June - Arkane Austin, the now-external Tango Gameworks, and Alpha Dog - as Xbox boss Phil Spencer discussed a lack of overall growth in the console market.

Writing in Microsoft's 2024 Annual Report, released last night, Nadella painted a rosier picture, however.

"We are bringing great games to more people on more devices," Nadella wrote. "With our acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, which closed October 2023, we've added hundreds of millions of players to our ecosystem. We now have 20 franchises that have generated over $1bn in lifetime revenue—from Candy Crush, Diablo, and Halo, to Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, and Gears of War.

"And with Xbox cloud gaming, we continue to innovate to offer players more ways to experience the games they love - where, when, and how they want. Finally, we brought four of our fan-favorite titles to Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation for the first time, as we continue to extend our content to new platforms."

That cross-platform publishing programme will continue over the next few months with the arrival of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for PC and Xbox in December, and PlayStation in February 2025, with the expectation that other games will then follow.

Female gamers prefer playing as highly sexualized characters, despite disliking them

Can a strong female character who is also highly sexualized inspire positive perceptions from players? Not necessarily, according to a new study in Communication Research. Researchers found that while strength in female video game characters might signal capability, it doesn’t counterbalance the negative impact of sexualization. But in a surprising twist, female participants—despite generally disliking highly sexualized characters—were more likely to choose these characters when given the option to play as one.

The study sheds light on why, even in today’s gaming landscape, character design matters—and how different types of interactions, from watching to playing, shape player perceptions. A character’s sex appeal and strength both play a role in how players perceive them, but these perceptions shift depending on whether players are simply watching or actively engaging with the character.