The $200,000,000 "Quadruple A" Skull and Bones Disaster

Developer here, i worked in this game for about 4.5 years across 3 different studios, and i'm proud of that game. Now you may be wondering how a developer is proud of a game that horribly flopped, that is not common & i agree with you? Simply because the game shipped is not the game i worked on, it is a totally different game that shares just the same name & theme! If that game shipped at the 1st planned release date (during the 2017 E3 announcement plan), with the same early design and under the same director (Justin) and the same cross-studio teams, it would've became the cash cow for Ubisoft just like R6, but what can i say, it is the typical Ubisoft executives Yves & Sergei with a banana level brain!

-m

It's funny that all these development stuff doesn't match with the final product

Why he say Pirates like that though?

Damn, it launched in 2044? Development Hell is real.

they need to hire more women who never played games, it will fix it for sure

Oh no, it's the best. Watch and be amazed as the people who steered the ship over the cliff sell the company for an incredible windfall. Gaming has been turned into money laundering with extra steps.

boring garbage video with ads

What's funny too is how they could've avoided the whole Sea of Thieves comparisons and how much better it was if they just didn't take so god damn long to make Skull and Bones. That game came out five years after AC Black Flag did, and EVEN THEN, SaB didn't come out until six years AFTER THAT.

Two words : Star Citizen.

Black flag was such a treasure, sailing the open seas, looting and battling ships, destroying the hunters, doing the underwater missions, fighting the legendary ships, taking over the forts, starting conflicts with the British, Spanish, and Portuguese etc...

Not to mention the battles to take over ships, deciding whether to trash or raid the boat, it was too much fun.

I guess fun had to make way for something else... no idea why this 3 foot birdie tap-in turned into a triple-bogey.

The lead character kind of resembles my late father, too. What a shame in every regard

Ubisoft has access to some of the best assets and artists in gaming. All they had to do is copy Assassin's Creed Black Flag and modify the gameplay. Sure its more complex than that, but reusing assets has made plenty of Ubisoft games quite satisfactory.

This game looks super sick if you’re into pirateship sims, dont know why it not succeed, maybe people dont like that theme.. watching past intro now maybe get answers

They charged full price for a game that shouldve been free to play to rven stand a chance, and even then it probably still wouldve flopped as the game is BORING.

A game so bad no one wants to even pirate it.

It just makes no sense when these game developers call themselves Single, Double and Triple "A". And now calling themselves "Quadruple A"?
Who comes up with this many "A's"?.

GVMERS covering Concord is inevitable.

i seen so many adds for this game, omfg.

I can’t believe Skull & Bones didn’t get nominated at this year’s Game Awards. The industry’s first AAAA title and it didn’t even get a mention. So sad 😂

"A delayed game can become good, but a game delayed 6 times should have never existed in the first place." - Kraven the Hunter

How do we cancel ubisoft?

They had gold, they mixed their dumbass corpo vision to what should have been a fun game and turned everything to shit. Go bankrupt already, you need a hard reset Ubisoft

Hahahahah singapore back at it again 👌👌👌

Seige was a fundamentally good game from the start and the combat mechanics of For Honor were highly innovative on launch. Skull and bones offers nothing new, You can't turn around something that has no prospects to begin with.

Another Ubisoft game I never played. Makes you wonder who they make games for.

Ubisoft only entertainment, is their downfall and Yves falling on muddy crap.

When investors think we know what we want:

Black Flag was not the first naval combat in Assassin's Creed. It was there in AC3.

Feels like this came out forever ago and it hasn't even been a year yet??? I played the demo for 15 mins then immediately uninstalled. I'm of the opinion that any live service game needs to be free to play if it has any chance to succeed. Slapping a $70 price tag on this was making it dead on arrival.

I'm always genuinely amazed that people took this long to realise how scummy Ubisoft is.

sid meier's pirates but newer, pretty much all I want, black flag had elements and it worked pretty well.

AC1 still looks, plays and feels fantastic. Even the lip-syncing is incredible.

Entire ubisoft needs to worship and sacrifice to pagan gods of they want things to turn around.

Skull and bones ist geiles Spiel, die Leute sollen einfach spielen 🫡🎮

Setting it around Madagascar was such a mistake. Ofc the region was historically relevant when it comes to piracy. But when we think of swashbuckler stories then most people think of Henry Morgan in Port Royal and of buccaneers drinking in Tortuga and dream about capturing the treasure fleet or raiding Panama or Cartagena and digging up treasure on tropic islands.

And you can't even be a proper pirate, the whole endgame is to become a "kingpin", a word that did not even exist back then. You become a rum runner and opium smuggler, a Taipan running an economic empire instead of having adventures on the high seas and getting chased by pirate hunters.

Im NOT saying skull and bones is a good game, but what upsets me is a group of people constantly claiming Ubisoft makes the same gameover and over but then also complain that skull and bones wasn't another assassin Creed game...

His voice from the beginning to now is different.

This voice feels AI.
Im unsubbbing

Just off the rip ....... it was more like 850 million 😂 its a great game for what it is.... but I think ubisoft should do a little bit of "financial investigation" as to where the money actually went.... cus its not an 850 million dollar quad a title..... it's playable, but its..... underwhelming in scope and vastly limited

As long as the money gets laundered sales dont matter

Whew- dodged a bullet there.

The video on socom you guys did. I've watched 4 times now. It was my online life in 2002. The nostalgia is so strong. All my clan members I still talk to to this day. Good times

see the funny thing is, I totally forgot that there was a BETA for this until the last like 2 days, and thought to myself "Huh, this thing is bad even for a BETA, and with only a few weeks until launch too? Yeah, it needs to be free, I'm not paying for this."


Boy was I ever right....

I hope to develop and improve the game over time and also need optimism in the development team.

You know you screwed up when even the shareholders - the people that legally own parts of your company - are questioning your decision making.

Concord is in the corner going "Hah 200 million over all those years? That's nothing..."

I love all these dives into everything.

I hope to see you do something on Concord, because holy crap, seeing these top tier devs pooping the bed is schadenfreude

.

The only tragedy about this disaster is the fact that the incompetent leadership that lorded over the project is still there. You have to be a special kind of stupid to fumble something as badly as Skull and Bones, and Ubisoft leadership are all Quadruple A stupid.

Ubisoft seems to have a habit of showing off their game functioning one way at E3, only to backtrack it and release something completely different and pretend they always intended the end result they offered. It may look close enough, but the empty promises aren’t kept and you find yourself searching for something that was taken out or never truly ever added in.

can't wait for the Assassin's Creed Shadow's downfall disaster review lmao

Their marketing was very BLM inspired, and yet you're telling me those people didn't show up in droves to support this game? Imagine my shock...