Yet another live service game, plagued by a tumultuous development cycle and lacking in narrative quality and longevity, has failed in record time.
I’m not talking about Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League; I’m referring to Ubisoft’s latest oozing of slop, Skull & Bones. This so-called “AAAA” pirate game falls far short in features and quality compared to 2013’s Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, for instance.
In defense of its $70 price tag, Ubisoft touted the live service game as the world’s first quadruple-A video game, emphasizing its immense scale, size, and long-term playability. However, despite its release in February, the game failed to generate any sort of excitement from players due to lackluster gameplay or rather the fact that the $70 live service title lacks the ability for players to swim nor does it have an actual ship boarding mechanic as Assassin’s Creed Black Flag once had, rather it had been replaced by a cinematic cutscene.
Despite Ubisoft touting the supposed “record player engagement” Skull & Bones had accumulated on launch for any Ubisoft title, the company has yet to reveal any actual metrics such as copies sold or any other sort of meaningful figure besides claiming that those who’ve been scammed into buying Ubisoft’s mundane $70 live service experience has averaged “four hours of daily playtime.”
According to a late February report from Insider Gaming, Skull and Bones had attracted around 850,000 lifetime players within a week of its release which sounds exciting.
The figure is however immensely inflated due to Ubisoft offering an 8-hour free trial of Skull and Bones from day one. Additionally, the game was initially announced during E3 2017 and has been in active development since 2013, facing numerous challenges such as changes in leadership, direction, and exceeding budget costs.
The game’s launch as a live service was a disaster, and actual player counts remain a mystery. It’s nearly impossible to determine if the game actually sold 850K units.
Thankfully, this doesn’t appear to be the case due to the trial however even if they did manage to shift that many units, Ubisoft would still face significant financial losses anyway. The actual takeaway here is that the game didn’t even manage to acquire one million players even with a free trial at launch.
Similar to Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Ubisoft’s Skull & Bones appears to be heading towards disaster. The game is already being aggressively discounted mere weeks after its launch, with Best Buy offering the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions for $44.99 but has since increased the price back to $70 whereas UK retailer Hit continues to price the games at £49.85.
According to TrueAchievements’ Xbox Gameplay Chart data, which aggregates information from a sample of 2.4 million random Xbox accounts, Skull and Bones had a launch week ranking 30th on the chart however, player interest has decreased substantially.
In the following week, Skull and Bones slipped to the 37th position on the chart, experiencing an 8% decrease in players. By its second week since launch, coinciding with the start of the game’s first live service season, player numbers plummeted by an additional 23%, causing the swashbuckling adventure to fall out of the top 40, ranking below Persona 3 Reload.
Overall, since its release, Skull and Bones has witnessed a decline of 31% in its Xbox player base, indicating a significant loss of interest in the game which is likely shared across all other platforms.
Ubisoft is seemingly mirroring Rocksteady’s missteps with their own live service failure, which debuted the week prior and has already plummeted to below 500 concurrent players on Steam.
In contrast, previous Ubisoft titles have experienced a surge in player counts, such as AC4: Black Flag, which saw a jump from approximately 950 concurrent players to over 3,000 starting from February 15th onwards.
It’s truly heartening to see that consumers are beginning to make more discerning choices. The modern flood of uninspired and lackluster games being pushed aside as people rediscover and appreciate older games that were genuinely innovative and crafted with passion, rather than driven by the greed of inept front fringes and dyed hair feminists obsessed with race and political ideology.
Honestly, I couldn’t be more happier that Ubisoft continues to bleed capital, like so many other game developers producing mundane and disinteresting garbage that preys upon the consumer through nefarious monetization practices, with Ubisoft being one of the many companies that associates with DEI peddlers, Sweet Baby Inc.
