Skull and Bones
A naval combat live-service game that cost a reported $750 million and eleven years to make, and plays worse than the Black Flag naval combat Ubisoft built in 2013 for a fraction of the cost.
- //Reported development cost of $750 million across eleven years and at least five major creative overhauls -- one of the most expensive games ever made.
- //Before launch, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot described it as "quadruple-A," a term he coined for the occasion. It became an instant meme.
- //Sold approximately 1 million copies in its first six weeks against a reported break-even estimate of 4-5 million.
- //Started as a potential spin-off of the widely acclaimed naval combat in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (2013).
- //Ubisoft's share price fell roughly 87% between 2021 and early 2025, with Skull and Bones as one of several major live-service failures in that window.
Skull and Bones is a live-service naval combat game where you captain a ship, fight other ships, and build up a pirate operation across an open sea map. It started life as an idea to spin off the acclaimed naval combat from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag into its own game, but went through at least five major creative overhauls across eleven years of development, at various points being a PvP title, a survival game, and a narrative-driven maritime game before shipping as what it is now. The naval combat itself functions -- ships move, cannons fire -- but after eleven years and a reported $750 million budget, that's a genuinely damning amount of competence to have to settle for.
The most competently executed $750M game I've encountered, and that description is not a compliment. Ships move, cannons fire, and none of it is more interesting than the naval combat Ubisoft built into Black Flag in 2013 for a fraction of the cost. Play that instead.