The long wait is finally over. After over a decade in the works, more than six years since its initial reveal, and a vast and sprawling sea of release date delays that extend all the way back to 2018, Ubisoft’s epic multiplayer pirate adventure, Skull and Bones, finally launched ship a little over a week ago. And as one might expect from a game that’s been as publicized as much as this one over the course of several years, it fell face-first on the poop deck.

It’s A Numbers Game, And Ubi’s Losing

Reports coming out over the past couple of days regarding Skull and Bones’ player count are not good, in case you hadn’t heard. Black Flag Online… err, Skull and Bones still hadn’t capped a million players as of February 22, and that’s not a good sign for its future, since it just released six days prior to that, with expectations of a huge launch looming ahead of time.

The numbers don’t get any better when you start to look at review scores, as neither players nor critics seem particularly fond of the multiplayer version of a much better game that came out back in the days when the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were still relevant (and my personal favorite Assassin’s Creed game). Of the three platforms it’s available on (which also include PlayStation 5 and PC), the Xbox Series X|S reviews are the kindest, but they still only garner it a Metascore of 63, with player reviews swirling down the whirlpool into an abysmal abyss of 3.6/10. Glug, glug.

And that’s all happening even though Ubisoft is offering an eight-hour free trial to anyone who bothers to install the game. That’s concerning. People love free stuff. But apparently, the gaming community at large feels Skull and Bones’ free trial is less like delicious appetizers being handed out at the supermarket and more like the neglected and wilting slop bucket full of decaying roses still sitting at the dollar store a week after Valentine’s Day, with a piece of paper lazily slapped on diagonally with scotch tape, begging customers to please just take them away.

If only there were a platform that could get Skull and Bones into players’ hands; a console-specific platform that pretty much everyone with that console will pay a monthly fee to access, with a proven track record of taking games that had disappointing launches and bringing in player numbers en masse. But surely, no such platform exists, right?

How To Profit Off A Game Everyone Hates

Hey, remember Starfield!? Of course you do. I’ve been both playing and writing about it incessantly since it launched back in early September of 2023, and it seems like the hype over it is just starting to slow down. Now, personally, that’s a game I love, because it fills my need for an endless, explorable sandbox, but I couldn’t tell you with a straight face that I don’t know it’s full of flaws, from the PS2-era-like frequency of loading screens to the uninspired cookie-cutter companions you’ve got to choose from.

And not everyone can look past its flaws as well as I can. Starfield’s still sitting at a pretty decent and “generally favorable” Metascore of 83, which wouldn’t be too shabby had it not been the first new RPG IP from Bethesda in decades, meant to stand alongside The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises. And the user reviews don’t paint the picture any prettier, only coming in at a 6.9/10, with more than a quarter of its players leaving negative reviews.

But despite all its flaws, Starfield still managed to attact 6 million players in its first day, as well as a concurrent player count that topped 1 million players. For the record, that’s a better launch than Skyrim,Fallout 4, or anything else Bethesda has ever put out. So how did it manage that?

Well, would I have picked up Starfield post-launch knowing all the complaints and criticisms it received? Probably, because it was giving me heavily modified No Man’s Sky vibes, and that’s another game I’ve sunk countless hours into, but I would have had reservations. Did I have to make that decision? No, because it was a day-one title on Game Pass.

Have I been excited for Skull and Bones for years based on my love of Black Flag? You betcha. Have I even bothered to take advantage of the free trial? Nope. But I’m sure if it had been offered on Game Pass, I’d have queued it up as soon as the pre-release installer popped up on my feed, and I’d probably be reveling in the aspects of the game that I’ve been excited about, and able to look past all its flaws.

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The Danger Of Running Out The Clock

With all that having been said, I haven’t seen any indication that Ubisoft is eager to get Skull and Bones onto Game Pass, or another subscription service like PlayStation Plus. And that seems like a mistake.

Now, I don’t work behind the scenes for Microsoft or Sony, and I don’t know the answer to the megacorporate mysteries of deciding just which games to offer or how to hash out the finer details of compensation to the developers or publishers. I’m just a person who likes to play video games, and who doesn’t like wasting their money on a bad game. And when it comes to epicly scoped games (like what seems to be the intention for Skull and Bones), I don’t know if I can form enough opinion in an eight-hour free trial window to determine if I’d be wasting my money and hard drive space by committing to it.

I realize I’d still have to go through the process of downloading the game and maybe freeing up some space if it were on a subscription service, but I could try it out at my own pace without a timer always ticking down in the back of my mind, making me wonder whether I was actually having fun without the distraction of number crunching the entertainment-to-price-point ratio.

Stressing out gamers should be left to difficult in-game fights and puzzles, not to a real-world countdown. I’d still like to try out Skull and Bones, and maybe I will at some point. But I’m in no rush, because I don’t like being on someone else’s timer. I think a lot of other players feel the same, and that’s where the heart of the player count problem lies.

Skull and Bones

Released

February 16, 2024

Developer(s)

Ubisoft Singapore

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