It's Ubisoft earnings day, which means we're due yet another update on the six-time-delayed pirate game Skull and Bones. And while the news is not explicitly another delay, the latest update is that we can expect Skull and Bones to launch sometime between January and March of 2024.
If you haven't been following the saga of Ubisoft's deeply troubled pirate adventure, buckle up. Skull and Bones was first announced way, way back at E3 2017, with a release window set for fall 2018. It has since been delayed a whopping six times, with the most recent delay in January of this year pushing the game, allegedly, to "early 2023-2024." It's a bit of a vague window that could have meant any time this past year or early next year, but at the time seemed to refer to Ubisoft's current ongoing fiscal year, which ends in March. So while hopes weren't high, Ubisoft seemed to be targeting a release window that's now once again passed them by.
In today's earnings report for the first half of its fiscal year (ending with September), however, it gave a new window of "Q4 2023-24," which would be between the start of January and the end of March of 2024. Given that we're now at six delays and counting, there's not a whole lot of reason to be confident in this assertion, especially with Skull and Bones losing its third creative director just last month. We did actually get to play the game in August and had a pretty good time with it, but it remains to be seen when everyone else will finally get their hands on it.
In addition to the wiggling around of Skull and Bones' release window, Ubisoft's earnings also slipped in a quiet game delay. Remember the "another large game" that the company has been teasing for this year in its earnings the last few quarters? It's been pushed to next year. While Ubisoft has not confirmed what this mystery game is, we know that Ubisoft expects it to be a bigger title on the level of an Assassin's Creed or a Far Cry, and Kotaku has previously reported it may be Star Wars: Outlaws, which was revealed earlier this year.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown are both still on track for December and January, respectively. XDefiant appears to be rescheduled after an indefinite delay to come out before the end of March.
Elsewhere in its earnings, Ubisoft reported net bookings for the quarter of €554.8 million ($584.1 million), up 36.6% year over year, driven by stronger than expected back catalog sales. The Crew: Motorfest also had a "record launch" for the franchise by unit sales, and Assassin's Creed: Mirage week one player numbers were "in line" with Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and Origins.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
