Ubisoft Delays Skull And Bones Again As Well As Another “Large” Game

Skull and Bones is pretty much a relic of the past at this point. French industry giant Ubisoft has recently published its financial report for the first half of the fiscal year 2023-2034, and with it, news of the tactical, ship-based action game getting delayed yet again. Skull and Bones will now target a release window of Q4 2023-24 which runs between next year’s January and March. 

The lineup for the remainder of the fiscal year includes, on the premium side, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora™, Just Dance® 2024 edition, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown and Skull and Bones™, which is set to release during Q4 2023-24.

To give you a little background on the matter, this is quite not the first time Skull and Bones has been prevented from reaching a dedicated release point. As a matter of fact, this is the game’s seventh launch delay—let that sink in for a minute. It happened for the fourth time back in May 2021, following the initial reveal of Skull and Bones at E3 2017. 

“We dreamt something bigger for Skull & Bones, and these ambitions naturally came with bigger challenges,” read the blog post at that time, with the devs saying that they needed more time for the title to manifest. Then came September 2022, and with it, a promise that the title would finally make landfall on 9 March 2023. We all know how that ended up. That’s right, with just another delay. 

Skull and Bones’ sixth delay came crushing at the start of this year, just as we were approaching its expected release. In an attempt to cut costs and manage its finances, Ubisoft canceled multiple titles and said, “The company is facing major challenges as the industry continues to shift towards mega-brands and long-lasting titles that can reach players across the globe, across platforms and business models.” 

To focus on another aspect of the same earnings report, there’s another interesting tidbit included in the document on its sixth page, which sees Ubisoft talking about a “large game” that was expected to launch this year. It’s suspected that the publisher is simply referring to Star Wars Outlaws here, given there’s no concrete release date surrounding that project as well. 

The company can therefore confirm its announced guidance of strong top line growth and non-IFRS operating income of approximately €400 million, without releasing the other large game it had initially planned to launch during the last quarter of the current fiscal year.”

Elsewhere, it was noted from the financial report that Ubisoft is “pleased” with how two of its returning IPs have done so far among some of the other top-dog releases in the gaming industry. Both Assassin’s Creed Mirage and The Crew Motorfest have sold great figures following their launch, with the former becoming Ubisoft’s biggest next-gen launch to date and the latter being The Crew series’ best release.

The Assassin’s Creed Mirage and The Crew Motorfest teams, respectively led by Ubisoft Bordeaux and Ivory Tower, have done a wonderful job to prepare the release of these new opuses, and the response from the community and fans has been fantastic,” says Yves Guillemot, co-founder and CEO of Ubisoft.