Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was a surprise. The quality of the open-world pirate project managed to give long-time fans new hope after the mostly disappointing Assassin’s Creed 3, which saw a slip in critical reception. The current and next-generation project hit all the right notes, but unfortunately, that didn’t exactly translate to higher sales.
During Ubisoft’s earnings for its third fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2013, the company revealed that Black Flag pushed 10 million units to retailers. That’s an impressive stat by itself, but just about two million copies less than the performance of last year’s game in the same time period (via IGN). That’s not great news for Ubisoft, since Black Flag was available on two additional platforms – the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
This doesn’t mean that the series is in some sort of uncontrollably skid, though. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that Black Flag, in the first six weeks of this year, has been outpacing Assassin’s Creed 3 during the same span last year. This could very well mean that Black Flag has stronger and longer legs than its predecessor, so we could expect the game to end with a higher sales figure in the end.
