This year, there are two major AAA games that are being used as examples to talk about over-investment in live service, resulting in large-scale bombs, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones and WB’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. But now, one appears to be performing worse than the other, according to the data we have available.
It appears that even though Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched poorly, Skull and Bones might be doing even worse.
While Skull and Bones was briefly inside PlayStation’s top 10 most played games at launch, it quickly fell out. That’s much worse than Suicide Squad, which at least debuted at #1 on PlayStation when it was released, and slowly sunk down the list rather than immediately falling off.
Additionally, February sales data shows Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as the third highest selling game of the month, behind only Helldivers 2 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Skull and Bones meanwhile is behind even Grand Theft Auto, debuting on the list at #8. It’s not doing much better in the EU at #7.
On Xbox, Skull and Bones is the 47th most-played game right now, just a couple weeks after the debut of the so-called quadruple A game. One piece of data we do not have is PC numbers, as Suicide Squad has done abysmally there, currently peaking at under 500 concurrent players some days. The Skull and Bones PC data is only known by Ubisoft, but given the rest of this, it’s hard to imagine it’s doing well.
What happened? I mean, the obvious. Like Suicide Squad, Skull and Bones launched as a live service game that demanded $70 up front, a cost that Ubisoft said is justified by the amount of content in it, but most players disagreed. It also appeared to be a game simply no one asked for.
Without question, the biggest thing sinking Skull and Bones is that most players simply did not want a live service pirate game where you play as a ship, rather than a pirate, which is baffling given that AC: Black Flag inspired the game in the first place. It feels like Sea of Thieves, now six years old, does everything better than Skull and Bones minus its graphics. It never felt like this game ever had a chance to succeed, and launch has proven those suspicions correct. And it didn’t get any help from critics either, scoring a 60 on Metacritic, the exact same as Suicide Squad, albeit Suicide Squad has had much better user scores.
This isn’t to say Suicide Squad is doing well. It definitely is not, ahead of its first, delayed Joker season coming at the end of this month. But it is doing a lot better than Skull and Bones? It sure seems like it.
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