Ubisoft’s biggest 2022 game delayed for sixth time in five years

2022 is turning out to be a substantial rebuilding year for game publisher Ubisoft, as its holiday 2022 release slate of major multi-platform games has now been all but wiped clean.

The bad news came on Wednesday when Ubisoft again delayed the launch of its open-world pirate adventure Skull and Bones, this time past its previously suggested November 8 launch date on PC and current-gen consoles. The game maker confirmed the delay to March 9, 2023, after an independent report from Kotaku suggested that S&B's latest rounds of pre-release testing pointed to a stable-but-boring experience for its online multiplayer modes and noted issues with the game's "progression" systems.

Skull and Bones debuted at E3 2017 as an apparent build-out of the third-person, open-seas pirate adventuring found in mid-'10s Assassin's Creed games—albeit with no formal ties to that other Ubisoft-helmed series. As originally announced, players would directly control a pirate ship's captain and issue orders to AI-controlled crewmates to either engage in a solo campaign or connect online for open-seas combat with both PvE (fight the computer) and PvP (fight real players) elements.

However, even as the game approached its previously confirmed November 2022 launch window, Ubisoft had yet to publish a clear video demonstration of how the final game might look to play—meaning, no direct-feed footage of players' viewpoints, in-game HUD elements, or demonstrations of how different modes will work. In the years since S&B's initial announcement, Microsoft and Rare's own online, open-world pirate series Sea of Thieves has racked up player counts and accolades while delivering substantial free patches and updates—all of which have rendered our initial criticisms of that 2018 game moot.

Ahead of S&B's fall 2018 launch window, Ubisoft began rowing the game's release date farther out to sea. Shortly before E3 2018, the game's retail launch was pushed into "fiscal year 2020," only to get bumped from that release calendar into "sometime after March 2020." This was followed by conference call mentions over the years that delayed S&B's launch into FY 2022, then FY 2023, before finally settling on its November 8 launch date earlier this year.

“Generous subsidies” may have come at a cost

According to an extensive 2021 report from Kotaku, S&B began development even further back than we had publicly heard: in 2013, as an expansion to the pirate-filled adventures of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The offshoot game's messy lifespan has reportedly been prolonged by a tenuous deal struck between Ubisoft and the government of Singapore, which allegedly gave the game maker's Singapore office certain "generous subsidies" in exchange for a guaranteed game launch and the development of unique IP by the company's Singapore studio. The report was so stuffed with behind-the-scenes stories of turmoil and toxicity that Kotaku broke out an additional feature-length piece on the project's underpayment, mismanagement, and sexual harassment of staffers.

Those stories, of course, were in addition to other reports and investigations about Ubisoft's allegedly pervasive issues with mismanagement, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Those allegations led to several major executives stepping down, even though Yves Guillemot, the longtime CEO who oversaw the company during its reported periods of turmoil, has remained on board. Axios' Stephen Totilo, who has spent years covering and investigating internal affairs at Ubisoft, recently suggested that the resulting executive efforts to turn the company's reputation around have been inconsistent and left company-wide morale generally low.

Between those issues and pandemic-related work disruptions, Ubisoft has come up short with other potential 2022 game launches. A recent Assassin's Creed announcement event confirmed reports that the series was undergoing a massive shakeup, and it suggested three standalone console games would launch at some point (no dates given). The Middle Eastern setting of Assassin's Creed Mirage will be the first to launch out of this collection (currently pegged to a "2023" launch window, but, hey, we'll see). Additionally, a third-person adventure game based on the James Cameron film series Avatar had been pegged for a late 2022 launch, only to be delayed earlier this year to sometime in FY 2024. A new free-to-play Division spinoff, dubbed The Heartland, was teased in 2021, and its closed beta may begin in 2022, but we don't expect this F2P spinoff to formally launch by year's end.

Thus, Ubisoft's remaining 2022 release calendar has little left: a sequel to the popular Mario + Rabbids strategy series (a Switch exclusive and co-production with Nintendo, which so far looks promising), an iterative sequel to its long-running casual Just Dance series, and this month's long-delayed launch of Rocksmith+, a paid-subscription version of its "Guitar Hero on a real guitar" series. Other Ubisoft console games came and went earlier this year: Rainbow Six Extraction, a January dud, and Roller Champions, a three-years-delayed free-to-play roller derby romp that eventually launched with very little fanfare or promotion from Ubisoft. The biggest news attached to Roller Champions in recent memory is a tweet that begins, "Let’s clear it out of the way first, Roller Champions isn’t getting cancelled"—which only inspires so much confidence coming from a publisher with a history of early F2P game shutdowns.