Ubisoft’s pirate problem has taken a fairly brutal turn
Ubisoft spent years trying to turn Skull & Bones into its next big live-service success story, but an upcoming remake of the game that inspired it may already be leaving it in the water. According to analyst Rhys Elliott, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced has already cleared 300,000 Steam pre-orders ahead of launch, putting it above the entire Steam lifetime performance of Skull & Bones before it has even released.
That comparison is painful for obvious reasons. Skull & Bones began life in the shadow of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, borrowing the naval fantasy that helped make Ubisoft’s 2013 pirate adventure such a beloved entry in the series. But after a famously troubled development cycle, repeated delays, and a launch that never seemed to capture the audience Ubisoft wanted, the standalone pirate game now finds itself being outsold by the return of its spiritual predecessor.
Not across every platform, to be clear. Elliott’s claim refers to Steam performance specifically. But even with that caveat, it still says something rather uncomfortable about where Ubisoft finds itself in 2026.
Players did not necessarily reject pirate games. They may simply have rejected Skull & Bones.
Black Flag Still Has What Skull & Bones Lacked
The obvious lesson here is that nostalgia is powerful, but that only explains part of the story. Black Flag is not remembered fondly simply because it is old. It is remembered fondly because it solved a problem Ubisoft had at the time without feeling like a corporate solution to one.
The Assassin’s Creed series was already beginning to strain under the weight of its own mythology by 2013. The modern-day storyline had become increasingly tangled, the annualized release schedule was starting to show, and the series needed a change of scenery. Black Flag delivered that change by becoming something Ubisoft almost accidentally made brilliant: a pirate game first and an assassin game second.
The Jackdaw, the sea shanties, the tropical islands, the naval battles, Edward Kenway’s self-interested charm. All of it gave Assassin’s Creed a sense of freedom the series had not quite captured before. Even now, more than a decade later, it remains the game many players point to when arguing that Ubisoft once knew how to make open worlds feel adventurous rather than mechanically exhaustive.
That is the difference between Black Flag and Skull & Bones. One felt like a game with a fantasy at its centre. The other too often felt like a business model looking for one.
To be fair, that may be a little harsh. Skull & Bones had its defenders, and it was never quite the disaster its reputation sometimes suggested. But it was also a game that arrived burdened by years of development baggage and the impossible task of proving why the thing players loved in Black Flag needed to be extracted, reworked, and turned into a separate live-service product.
The answer, apparently, was not especially convincing.
Elliott estimates that Black Flag Resynced has generated almost $14 million in gross Steam revenue before launch. He also claims the remake is tracking far ahead of Assassin’s Creed Shadows at the same point in its pre-release window, with more than five times as many Steam copies sold two days out.
If those estimates hold, then Ubisoft may have stumbled into one of its clearest strategic signals in years. The company does not necessarily need to reinvent itself with expensive new bets every time. It may need to remember what people already loved about its best games and treat that legacy with a bit more care.
Capcom figured this out years ago. Its remakes have not merely been nostalgia plays. They have become a central part of the company’s modern identity, giving old games new commercial life while reminding players why those franchises mattered in the first place. Ubisoft, by contrast, has often seemed oddly hesitant to mine its own catalogue beyond remasters and incremental re-releases properly. Black Flag Resynced could change that.
It arrives at a useful moment, too. Ubisoft has spent the past several years dealing with delayed projects, underperforming releases, restructuring, and a persistent sense that one of gaming’s biggest publishers has lost some of its old confidence. A successful Black Flag remake would not fix all of that, obviously, but it would offer something the company badly needs: a relatively low-risk win built around a game people already want to love.
There is an irony here that is hard to ignore. Skull & Bones was supposed to be the future of Ubisoft’s pirate fantasy. Instead, the past has returned to show it up before launch day.
Maybe that says more about Black Flag than it does about Skull & Bones. Maybe it says more about the enduring appeal of a great design blueprint than the failure of a troubled live-service experiment. But for Ubisoft, the takeaway should be obvious enough.
Sometimes the treasure is exactly where players said it was all along.
