subscription model

Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian, criticized Ubisoft's decision to disband the development team behind Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, attributing it to a "broken strategy" favoring subscription models over traditional sales. Despite the game receiving an 86 aggregate score on Metacritic and positive reviews, Ubisoft reassigned the development team, which Douse believes undermined the game's potential success. He noted that Ubisoft's earlier comments about players not truly owning their games contributed to this situation. Douse pointed out that Ubisoft's last notable game was Far Cry 6 in 2021, and subsequent releases did not perform as expected, suggesting the subscription model may have led to decreased engagement when Prince of Persia launched in 2024. He argued that the game would have likely succeeded had it been released on Steam, where it eventually became available on August 8, seven months post-launch, but by then, momentum had waned. Douse highlighted that Ubisoft began returning titles to Steam in 2022 and announced that all future releases would launch on Steam on day one. He emphasized that Steam accounts for over 90% of total sales for premium games on PC, and the game's absence from the platform at launch limited its audience reach. Larian founder Swen Vincke also expressed concerns about the subscription model's impact on content quality, stating that their games would not be found on subscription services.