The seas have been choppy of late for live services games looking to make a name for themselves, with most of them sinking forlornly to the bottom of the Steam charts. Skull and Bones is one such game that seems to be heading in that direction. It's not that it's bad exactly, as corroborated by our review, it's just that stripping the colourful characters, the exploration, and swashbuckling silliness out the Golden Age of Piracy setting in favour of unsightly live-service trappings leaves you with something rather niche, instead of a fantasy that just about anyone can get onboard with (like, say, Sea of Thieves or Black Flag).
Also, declaring Skull and Bones a "quadruple-A game" shortly before launch was maybe one of the most pride-before-fall statements in the history of gaming (honourable mention to John Romero 'making us his bitch' with Daikatana).
But it seems that Ubisoft isn't done with Skull and Bones yet, as Insider Gaming has reported that Ubisoft has plans for Year 2 content for the game. How many players will actually be around to play this content is a bit of a mystery. Steam Charts shows Skull and Bones averaging under 200 concurrent players in the last 30 days, though it's worth noting that it only came to Steam some six months after its initial launch on Ubisoft Connect. On the other hand, plenty of other online games—the Battlefield series, Titanfall 2, Sea of Thieves, to name a few—found success on Steam despite arriving on the platform years after their initial launch, so those Skull and Bones numbers don't look great comparatively.
Insider Gaming's source didn't reveal Skull and Bones' current player numbers, saying only that they "might surprise people."
Continuing to support a service game into a second year—especially one with as much investment as this—may not seem surprising, but in this case it's coming from a company who announced two weeks ago that it would be shutting down its online shooter XDefiant after little over six months after its initial release (and subsequently laying off nearly 300 employees). At least keeping Skull and Bones afloat would help prevent another round of layoffs, but it's looking every bit like a game on borrowed time.
