The Rogue Prince of Persia peaks at less than 1,000 concurrent players on Steam, but devs have huge plans for Early Access

The Rogue Prince of Persia, already the second game in the series this year, has just launched in Early Access. Let’s take a look at its initial metrics and player reception.

Released on May 28, The Rogue Prince of Persia is currently only available on Steam and GeForce Now (via cloud). This is due to the Early Access nature of the launch, especially given that Ubisoft usually distributes its titles on PC through its own store.

The Rogue Prince of Persia is a side-scrolling action roguelike developed by Evil Empire, an indie studio behind many Dead Cells expansions such as Return to Castlevania and The Bad Seed. It currently has a 74% rating (“Mostly Positive”), but there are only 178 user reviews.

It appears that players generally love the combat, acrobatics, and smooth animations, but many criticized the lack of variety for a roguelike title and expressed hope that Evil Empire will improve the game before the end of EA.

“Yeah we’re aware everything is far from perfect (thanks Hades 2 for setting the EA bar that high!), we’re truly committed in supporting the game and hopefully make you change your mind,” one of the devs responded to a negative review. The nod towards Supergiant is especially interesting, given that Evil Empire postponed the launch of The Rogue Prince of Persia due the surprise release of Hades II.

According to SteamDB, The Rogue Prince of Persia peaked at only 849 concurrent players on Steam. It is unclear what expectations Ubisoft had for the game’s launch, but these are unfortunately pretty poor numbers (not to mention very low review count).

Evil Empire said it will try to release updates for the game on a weekly basis, planning to double the amount of content from EA to version 1.0. “Please be patient with us during Early Access,” the studio noted. “Even though Ubisoft is the publisher we are just a small team working on the game here at Evil Empire, so we won’t be able to make big changes instantly, as much as we would like to!”

Earlier this year, Ubisoft released Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a metroidvania developed by its first-party Montpellier team (Rayman, Beyond Good & Evil). Despite very positive reviews from critics and warm player reception, the game reportedly didn’t sell well at launch. According to Insider Gaming, it only reached 300k players, with some employees telling the publication that the bad reputation that the company has earned in recent years is negatively impacting sales.