With Ubisoft Singapore losing 70 positions this week, it is worth looking back at the game that defined the studio — and arguably sealed its fate.
Skull and Bones shipped on February 16, 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC after roughly ten years in development and an estimated $200 million in costs. It reviewed poorly, sold softly, and never became the live-service pillar it was built to be.
How It Got There
The project started in 2013 as an expansion for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Its naval combat was good enough that someone decided it deserved to be its own game — an MMO spinoff, initially, under the name Black Flag Infinite.
From there it went sideways repeatedly. A Kotaku investigation found the game changed direction and scope many times, blowing through its budget on multiple occasions. The setting moved from the Caribbean to a fantasy Hyperborea, then to East Africa and Southeast Asia. Gameplay swung from naval exploration to ship-to-ship combat to — at one point — land-based survival mechanics inspired by Rust.
Developers quoted in that reporting blamed conflicting ideas, management churn and a lack of consistent direction. Anyone who has worked on a long project will recognise the shape of that problem.
There was also a strange structural constraint: reporting in 2021 indicated the game could not be cancelled because of the scale of subsidies it received from the Singapore government.
The Delay Calendar
Skull and Bones became an industry punchline largely because of how often it moved:
- Announced at E3 2017, targeting 2018
- Pushed to 2019, then past March 2020
- Moved to fiscal 2021–22, then 2022–23
- Dated November 8, 2022 → March 9, 2023
- Delayed again to fiscal 2023–24 after weak launches elsewhere
- Finally released February 16, 2024
Six publicly acknowledged delays, and that is not counting the internal ones.
The Reception
Critics were not kind:
| Platform | Metacritic |
|---|---|
| PC | 58 |
| PlayStation 5 | 59 |
| Xbox Series X|S | 63 |
GameSpot gave it 4/10. PCGamesN called it “a bad pirate game 11 years in the making.” Eurogamer awarded 2/5, noting that entertaining naval combat could not rescue a lifeless adventure. IGN was more generous at 7/10, but the aggregate lands firmly in “mixed.”
Commercially it did not recover. UK boxed sales debuted fourth, at less than a quarter of Sea of Thieves’ launch. Insider Gaming estimated around 850,000 players — including free trial users — within its first week.
Yves Guillemot defended the $70 price by calling it a “quadruple-A game.” Players were not convinced.
Why It Matters Now
A studio that spends a decade and $200 million delivering a Mixed-rated live service is a studio with a target on it. That is the context for this week’s cuts. When Ubisoft went looking for reductions, Singapore had a defining project that underperformed and a next project that has never been formally announced.
It is a hard lesson, and an expensive one. Browse the full catalogue in our game hubs if you want to see how it stacks up against other live-service attempts.
Ten years and $200M for a Metacritic in the 50s is the clearest example of why live-service pivots mid-development go wrong.
The game is not terrible, it just shipped about six years too late to matter. Timing is part of the budget.