Skull and Bones, the Singaporean government's official pirate simulator, is setting sail for its first season following its release earlier this month, and Ubisoft is touting some stats to celebrate.
In a press release announcing the first season of Skull and Bones, Ubisoft boasted that the game had achieved “record-breaking player engagement since launch,” which is essentially a marketing way of saying that players are investing a lot of time into the game. Specifically, Ubisoft says that the game's players spend “more than four hours of average daily play time, the second highest ever at Ubisoft,” which, if I have to be honest, is incredible surprising to me.
I didn't enjoy my time at Skull and Bones, and I certainly wasn't alone in that here at PCG. In his review of Skull and Bones, PCG's Shaun Prescott gave the game a score of 68% and wrote, “It doesn't compare well to the decade-old game that inspired it” and was reviewed by Live -Service elements paralyzed. Robin Valentine fell in love with another pirate game that came out around the same time, and Fraser Brown has put together a whole list of nautical games that you'd probably have more fun with.
That's why I was a little surprised to learn that the game was Ubisoft's second best performer when it came to player hours consumed, but I think we need to keep two important things in mind to put this statistic into context. First of all, there's probably a reason why Ubisoft brags about “player engagement” rather than “player count.” Since no concrete numbers are available, I can only speculate, but I imagine the number of people actually playing Skull and Bones is probably not that impressive after the lukewarm reception it received upon release.
I reached out to Ubisoft to ask about Skull and Bones' player count and the publisher's game with the highest player retention (I was curious), and I'll update this article if I hear back.
The second thing to keep in mind is that Skull and Bones is designed to take hours to complete. Shaun Prescott noted this in the PCG review, noting that the game compares favorably to its predecessors only if your measure of quality is “the number of hours it can take in a lifetime.” With that in mind, it's less surprising that the die-hard fans who love the game are spending record hours at sea. That's how the game is made.
The first season of Skull and Bones is now available. Here is the corresponding trailer.
