Was Skull & Bones The Biggest Financial Flop Of 2024?

While it’s not exactly “nice” to talk about certain failures in the gaming industry, if you don’t talk about them, then no one will improve from its mistakes. Or, as one YouTube personality puts it, “Let’s all laugh at an industry who never learns anything…tee hee hee.” While that line is a bit harsh, it’s also very representative of certain companies who keep making the same mistakes without thinking that there will be consequences down the line. Easily, the biggest one that this line applies to is Ubisoft, which has had multiple failures in 2024, with Skull & Bones being its biggest.

This was a game that was announced in 2017 and was meant to piggyback off the success of the naval battles it created for one of its flagship franchises. Pun intended. However, over ten years of total development, including the period before it was announced, the game had numerous restarts, changes, and more that led to it being D.O.A. upon release early in 2024. That brings us to Tech4Gamers, who cites ENDYMIONtv for details about how bad the game did. According to this source, Skull & Bones took between $650-850 million to develop!

Before you scream, “It couldn’t have been that high!” you need to remember that this game had been in development for almost a decade and that it had gone through many changes during that period. The longer you work on a video game, and the more changes you have to make through that period, the higher the price will get.

If this is true, then that would make it an even more costly endeavor than Sony’s big flop that happened in 2024. The irony of that is not only that these were apparently massively expensive games but that they were both live-service titles that were meant to “gain lots of money over time,” and yet it won’t gain much at all, especially now that one of them is shut down.

So, do we blame Ubisoft for what happened with its pirate title? Absolutely. First, developing a pirate game should not take ten years, as Rare did it in less time and has made it last quite a while.

Second, Ubisoft’s CEO tried to “lie his way to success” by noting it was a “AAAA title” before its release, which it wasn’t even close to being. Finally, when the game did launch, it didn’t even hold up graphically and gameplay-wise to the title that inspired it!

When you add all this up and throw in the company’s other failures in the last year or so, you can see why the company is currently in dire straits.