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.
Yeah, this is classic class warfare and the trajectory of these things has been moving away from developers having any say for a long time, the difference now is that business majors have finally found a killer app to convince society it is ok to destroy software development as a decent career… it is called AI and it doesn’t actually matter if it works or not, the point is to convince people it is only natural and right to treat software devs like worthless commodified contract labor that is just around the corner from being entirely obsolete.
I find it darkly hilarious how confident so many people who work in the software industry are that they aren’t about to have their future crushed by the rich. Again it really doesn’t matter if AI lives up to the hype at all, if AI fails to deliver and a market crash happens all the better since society will readily accept that as proof there needed to be a market correction on out of control labor costs for development, consolidation will occur and the labor of software development will be indefinitely and likely permanently devalued.
This should be clear as day to programmers but people who program for a living tend to think understanding programming is a shortcut to understanding everything and it leads to hilariously naive views from otherwise apparently very intelligent people.
Make no mistake this is the beginning of an awful era for game developers and software development.