@@YaToGamiKuro it's not the same people lmao that's why it's good, people are still experiencing or coming back from years of not playing it and they finish it because it's a good game.
if we be real for a sec, lower budget will make the creators develop the game in more creative ways usually to achieve certain tasks. unlike today, slap that UE5 engine and raytracing and call it a day.
If you account for outsourcing and the whole decade of development, sources say it's actually 650 to 850 millions not 200. Concord was around 400 millions (200 millions before the alpha, 200 millions after)
@@Lograh Lets assume they have 4 times the amount on all other platforms. Its still £20000 per player just for dev cost... Not sure that's really better.
I have a cousin who worked in the Singapore office. This game single-handedly turn his dream of working in game dev to agreeing with his mother when she said decades ago that working in video games would bring him neither happiness nor wealth.
to be brutally honest if you apply / work at ubisoft and call yourself a game dev after ...2015, you need immediate psychiatric help but in general that sucks for your cousin
I am a IT project manager. This is a classic "feature Creep" situation. What this means is that when you have a Project like Skull and Bones features are constantly being proposed and added to the project AFTER the design has already been decided. This constant adding of new features, redesigns, re-thinks, second-guessing results in delays, cost overruns, and generally a inferior result. Which is precisely what happened here. They should have stuck to the original design -single player version of Black flag, which focused only on the naval stuff. When they added "live services" and "narrative driven" and multiplayer and a whole host of unnecessary features they killed their own project.
Nope not feature creep they cut out the fun part. Esp the sea battle from black flag part. And the resource gathering/ crafting part are designed with micro transaction in mind. They are also planning for skin/ship/weapon ingame purchase. Making the game a live service husk.
Also a year ago, they released a remastered version of it with full co-op, graphic update, all the mission packs and some extra and modern system control/ settings options. If you already owned the game before, it was a just free patch.
If you guys feel bad for the Ubisoft staff that used to make the good games in past, dont. Since they were fired long ago, clearly shown by decline in game quality.
I think there was a previous video from asmongold where either veilguard or the assassin's creed game had half of its developers were fresh outta water.
This is true. Patrice Désilets, the original creator of AssCreed has made exactly one game since AC:Brotherhood in 2010, and it was garbage. Michel Ancel, the creator of Beyond Good & Evil is a literal scammer. BG&E2 has been in development for 15 years.
It's actually depressing how many games are pumped with millions of $'s... Built for the shareholder and not the gamer, then they scratch their heads why the games tank?! When will they figure it out?
A quick look at Ac: Black Flag will tell you everything about why Skull and Bones failed. The gameplay, graphics, art style, everything was BETTER in a game 10 years older than skull and bones.
Ubisoft wanted to cancel it long ago, but Singaporean goverment didnt let them because they had a partnership, and Singapore wanted to produce a AAA game to promote their country and public image of it
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96Nah man, I lost a friend to AC BF. He was gone for like a whole year. Old school AC fans might not have liked it but it was a massive hit
Loyal and true gamers who catapulted Ubisoft into Fortune 500 were taken for granted or abandoned. People who once called us 'losers' cuz we were gamers or loved comic books, now use our tech to make sick money and destroy self-esteem of others. I recently made a video of X360 as the last great generation, hope I'm wrong....
yeah they hate gamers now, because now Ubisoft is full of activists, who are woke and actually hate us gamers, because we want fun, not a crazy, woke ideology
Black flag was such an easy lay up for this game, they could have extended the tech to make this amazing but they fumbled badly. It's truly staggering incompetence and Sea of Thieves came along and beat them to it starting from scratch. They could have taken Black Flag, network the ocean using shared RNG seeds and clock sync, network the vessels, finessed the wave LODs mesh generation for improved inter-ship vis (really the only semi-expensive part). Keep the combat system and construct whatever game mechanics you choose around that core (treasure farming, sea monster raids, and ship upgrades for doubloons etc). It is utterly incomprehensible that they could not get from Black Flag to a decent multi-player experience in 2-3 years, except that their process must have been thoroughly dysfunctional.
I think the actual loss is closer to 500.000.000 USD, and due to ESG kickback's and goverment financial aid's, it might be only 200 million... So, 500.000.000 USD makes sense to why it was called a "Quad A game".
Many publishers/developers have failed to maintain their game engine. The talent who made it possible are rarely at the companies anymore, so you have a bunch of people coming in to try to understand and work around something that they often have little or no understanding of.
EVE online has basically collapsed because of this. At one point they tried to turn off the billboards in the game and it broke the entire game for a week 😂
My ideal pirate game is an "open sea" mmo, start off just a dude, try to join someones crew or start with a little paddle boat and set out. Island exploration, ai crew that can be found/looted that give small bonuses to ship durabilityj, speed, cannon fire, etc. Hiding loot mechanic (bury your treasure) but when you do that, it generates a map in your inventory, if you die, your map is lootable. Mutiny mechanics. Combat as a pirate would first person.
@@arthurgoonie4596 yea but the ai crew is important to me. Less focused on having to manage the ship, and focus on the fun stuff. But if you want to, remove your crew and have a player crew. My ideal “crew” mechanic would like suidoken where you recruit from a list of 100 or so crew members throughout the world that find through playing. “Finding the best crew for your purposes”. Oh and a Torguga like island for all the dirty pirates to hangout and gamble and other minigames.
@brandonmeyer2327 it wouldn't be hard for them to add that I think they'd just add some board games to sanctuaries and use Skelton ai for crew mates the only problem is sea of thieves is all open these is no safe zones so your ship would get sunk unless they add like really strong non ai skeleton ships to manage people that attack within safe zones but it defeats the point of a pirate game.
@@arthurgoonie4596 Well they could just add a "North India Trading Company" that hangs around towns. Except Tortuga where... anything goes :D. Its just crazy how skull and bones not add ANY of the fun pirate stuff.
This game shouldve been most straightforward release ever, or at least as starightforward as game development can get. Take AC black flag, remove the assassins creed aspects from it and replace it with a strictly pirate centered story and updated graphics. The gameplay was already there, the crafting system was already there, the ship combat and traversal was already there. And they fucked it up beyond all comprehension and turned it into a pirate skinned World of Warships. Its honestly impressive really how greed and mismanagement can fuck up so badly on what shouldve been a license to print money. Unbelievable
There's probably Skyrim modders out there that would be able to do that, and more, and it wouldn't take them 10 years. It would be Skyrim though, not AC: Black Flag, but maybe you get the point
I was a huge CDPR fan and i still haven't changed my mind on Cyberpunk. Yes it's flashier today but the main story still sucks, the man who ruined Cyberpunk was the guy so bad at planning they had to cut the part of the game where you work your way up enough with Jackie to even be noticed by Dexter de Shawn. That was the fun part, having a time bomb in your head after the prologue in a character you have no attachment to is just stupid. You don't know Jackie long enough to care when he dies, what you learn about him at the funeral should be what you learn about him before he dies. If you think Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game today you are a cat and like shiny things like laser pointers, not story.
I remember that before cyberpunk came out, there was a lot of devs that worked on w3 created their own studios. A lot of them. Good ambitious devs left the company, they had to hire a lot of new people. Cdpr is no longer the same company that created Witcher 3, people who did create Witcher are gone doing their own things.
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96I don't like seeing people lose their jobs but then I don't like mediocre games being rewarded either. Because then we will just get more of them
It's crazy when you think about it, AC black flag is probably the best Ubisoft pirate game adaptation. They really spent 8 years. Building a new pirate game with inspiration drawn from AC Black flag, but it was actually worse and less than its inspiration. How do you make less when you had more to start with?
It was the only way to retrospectively justify the money they shoveled onto the bonfire to create it. "Quadruple A" is a construction of MBAs who never understood their business or tech, trying to cover for a disastrous and bloated development cycle.
Imagine, game devs and journo put all their effort into painting us as the villain instead of this. A bloated market strategy and project management that will never succeed. SMH.
When you are ideologically inclined to push out the "old guard"(mostly talented vets and normal talented people), you will eventually have 150% of the worst talent and junior devs that need heavily babysat to make up for it. I'm surprised half of these games even boot up. Lol
I actually think if you swapped the publisher, the developer, the genre, the price point, the gameplay, and the overall story, this could’ve been a good game. 7/10
The funniest thing I remember seeing about Skull n' Bones was when, if you're starting a new game, it gives you this spiel about how you need to not cheat, and be kind to any & all players you are with... in a game about _pirates,_ mind you.
5:15 This is the direct result of Diversity Inclusion and Equity doctrine. The best programmers and game devs were pushed out and replaced with yes men and women.
One day someone will realize that they can just make Sid Meyer's Pirates but in 3rd person with black flags controls and we will have the best pirate game possible
We can only dream. I really wanted rockstar to get off their lazy arses and being experimental again to make such game. A rockstar Pirate age game would be godly
It's weird because ubisoft is known for making massive open worlds and they new everyone wanted another black flag but they gave us an empty ocean world with loading screens and limited land exploration? All they had to do was make black flag 2 and we would've been ok with it. They should've combined AC-3 with black flag but only remove the assassin's creed lore from the world.. not remove entire mechanics and features from their game like parkour and the ability to get out of your ship wherever you want.. so dumb they did that.
Too bad all the employees that were known for making those good games are long gone. Like if they suddenly hired you at ubisoft 5 minutes from now you wouldnt be known for making amazing open world games. Company names dont do anything, its the people working at those companies.
2:00 isnt that hypocrisy? They didnt want to use an already established franchise to do something new, yet they are doing it right now with every other franchise! Tom Clancy with Xdefiant, even assassins creed in a way. Clearly Ubi has no direction at all
Endymion reported that his sources said it actually cost between $650m and $800m. Considering it was billed as AAAA and other AAA games are over $200m, I tend to believe that. Also, IGN gave it a 7/10 lol.
@@Ozzystrayroo well look at concord that spent $400m. Concord was in development for 8 years while Skull and Bones was 11 years. Let's say that 100 people worked on this and their average salary was 100k per year. Over 11 years that alone is $110m. Now what would happen if it was actually 500 people or 1000?
@@jasonyankovec8541 well it could be, it's just suspicious as heck. And not to mention that the Singaporean government is subsidizing this game. And here is the thing, i would not be surprised if they probed this one out and find out if UBISOFT redirect some of those fund into their other projects. Because it seems that they only released this bare game just because the Singaporean government threaten to sue them if they did not release the game
Fun Fact: There are curently 372 people playing Assassin's Creed 1 right now and that game came out in 2007. The only AC games that have less are the 3 Chronicles games and the 2 Standalone games Liberation, and Freedom Cry (excluding AC3 bc of AC3 Remastered). All that aside every AC game 18 in total has seen a 33% or higher increase in player count on steam in the past 30 days.
"Skull and bones" was a failure because it was a lie from the beginning. It should have been like a mix from atlas and black flag. Ship design, a crew, a captain, with occasional ports to drop and secure loot. No base building on land. Your ship is your base and the more loot / money you have the bigger your ship and crew. Sea monsters, treasure maps, PVP, pve, and every player would have their own upgrade trees based on what role they chooses. Captain has captain buffs healing skills, cannon crew has cannon / stun / tank light dps / fighting skills, your deck hands have repair skills / long range high DPS / scouting / treasure map skills. It's not hard to envision. You can port islands for raids and treasure. You can port at pirate islands for banking and upgrades. You can sail the open sea and fight various sea monsters for reputation gains and treasures. Basically sea of thieves but larger custom ships and crews with talent trees and unique individual loot like equipment upgrades ark style. Ascendant gear being the top tier.
Im gonna say something wild: i wish we had a modern day assassins creed 1 remake/sequel in the holy lands again. 1980s lebanon-syrian civil wars + palestine intifada era, with the same cities as ac1 but 1000 years later and you could even keep the same storyline.
A giant building could be built for $200,000,000. This is like building that skyscraper and then having it collapse before you are able to get insurance on the building because there is no such thing as insurance for a failed game. Concord was double that. Crazy.
concord was past the level of human comprehension clearly as it wasnt even alive for a day before we had to strip it off the market it was just too good
I get the feeling their hype about taking feedback turned more into common corporate, the feedback we like may get acknowledged, and negative things about our product is on verge of not even getting acknowledged ever existed.
A Friend who worked for Quantic Dream (Also in France as Ubisoft), told me about this game : 1) Skull and Bones was a running joke among the teams.... the game was abandoned many times... the joke was >. Redoing from scratch again and again 2) Everybody knew this is not a AAAA games. But the actionners wanted make the most money they could out of it... so they call it this way. But everybody knew it was trash from the beginning. 3) The Head master of Quantic Dream put his Wife as Manager.... My friend who work on motion capture told me she tell them : >... then 1 year later >... and just couldn't understand a sh.t...
Developers need to step back and get back to basics. Such as developing an actual good story line and stop these live service cash grabs. It’s embarrassing
Black Flag is another one of those older games that will make you wonder how massively the industry has regressed and kind of make your jaw drop. We have become totally accustomed to bad and mid games, like music and movies.
Assassin Creed 4 is the peak. Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5 is the peak of Ubisoft graphics and game design following the third entry. Origins and Can't speak for ODYSSEY were okay but not great and yet no AC4 Ubisoft is cooked.
Sid Meier's Pirates from 2006 has 178 players in game right now compared to 196 for Skull and Bones right now. So that's only 18 more than a game from 18 years ago.
Ah black flag I could listen to those sea shanties all day. Great game. The announcement of skull and bones just seemed stupid. Just make black flag 2 with more shanties 😅
I spent most of my time in the game on the ship. It was great. I wish Skull and Bones would be just like Black Flag was but without the AC stuff of course.
"hiring trash young developers" It's not trash young developers, it's that sociopolitical identity and DEI based hiring is not ideal for quality production. I guarantee there are plenty of young developers (or aspiring to be) who are plenty talented enough to professionally compete but are forced to work in an environment that is also trying to be your social environment to which if you don't fit in or prefer a work environment to be strictly professional (most people) then you'll likely be fired or pressured into quitting. There's a reason why every time a developer says something bafflingly out of touch it always turns out to be the sentiments of the entire developing team, it's because the hiring practices does a better job creating a social group rather than a work force.
@@Zan_Jayna So Asmon taking 3 minutes to respond to a comment which isn't even close to the same thing in this comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the 39 minute video is the entire point of the video? Did you even watch it?
5:30 I can explain this: the people that make the games are the ones that actually learn and grow and make better games. Those people are gone, so now they are back to 0.
It peaked at 2600?? Holy wow that's low. Suicide Squad peak was at least 10x that and it done.. Infinite greed strikes again. Whats worse is THEY ALREADY HAD THE BLUEPRINT!
Paid 10 bucks for a copy, I've really enjoyed the PVP quite a bit. Badly set expectations hurt the game a lot. It's not nearly as as bad as the discourse around it, but the Internet loves a dog pile. Still some really wildly bad business decisions around this game but the herd decided it was bad and lots like the comfort and safety of the herd.
I played Skull and Bones in open beta and had a very fun weekend playing it. Ship to ship combat, simulation of storms, rain, water physics and how combat felt actually was very enjoyable in my opinion. It's not a great game. Not a bad one either.
This company can't fail fast enough. Not this game but all they had to do for Crew 3 was update the map of crew 2 but instead they decided to get rid of the one thing that made their game stand out, a fully explorable united states, and did a single island of Hawaii. They're adding one more island with DLC. Idiots.
They had one job. ONE. Take the ship combat and the combat system out of Black Flag, and then write a NEW STORY. add a new map. This should take around 3 years with a team, because most assets are already written, except new art and the story. Tweak the combat system a bit, tone down the assassination part, and strengthen the martial arts and gun use. Done. They did fail on an epic level that nobody is able to explain.
How do they go back in time. Studios pushed out old veteran game designers and programmers for the young and inexperienced university grads. With little experience and a low / non existent work ethic tied with the entitlement mentality, how could that possibly go wrong.
About Skull & Bones, they could've just used Black Flag's game mechanic with better graphic, richer storylines, & bigger maps. But they were too busy making everything to do with identity politics, they forgot about it all.
Black flag is 10 years old and beats it in every way still. Also you have Sea of Thieves which beats it in every way on top of that. Who was this even made for?
Passion is core here. Passion will force you to learn what you don't know. Look at RockStar i'd bet money theres quite a few systems in their games that early into development they had no idea how to do but they have passion in the vision of the game. That will drive you anywhere to get that information. These leads quit because they had no passion to learn about the concepts for this project when probably faced with other annoyance being deadlines, annoying bosses or coworkers. Passion will take you through hell, without it you do not give a single F
So, I've just looked - Assasin's Creed IV Black Flag has around 2500 current players! A game, that has been released more than 10 years ago from the same company has more than 10x people playing it than the company's current release ^^'
Back then, when I had an SNES a new game was 100.- DM ($50). Then we got a PC and games for PC where just half the price. Guess what I did, I switched to PC and never went back to consoles. Sales on Steam make PC gaming even better, especially when the best games nowadays are indie titles.
ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS TAKE Black Flag, and take out any Assassin's Creed story stuff, write new story stuff focusing on pirate adventures. Done. PRINT MONEY. But they were greedy and their creative directors were clueless... so this is what happened.
Its a pirate ship game... how hard can it be? I mean you have a Home base, you deck it out with stuff and facilities that help to build better ship(or armada if guild). Then you add some simple story and make the ship combat with Some kind of meele kind duel. That should be enough for a 7/10 game.
Ubisoft were literally handed a golden goose with Black Flag's ship combat, and they elected to butcher it before it had laid even a single egg. One of the most monumental fumbles in history.
It's impressive how all these big game publishers make games with huge budgets and teams of hundreds of people, that still somehow end up playing and looking worse than something made by a couple of indie developers, in a cave, with a box of scraps.
Whoever was calling the shots on Skull and Bones had one of the biggest fails in video games history. All they had to do was take the formula from Black Flag, remove Assassin’s Creed from it, and expand upon the pirate aspect of it. How hard is that? To be honest, multiplayer was always a bad idea here. Unlike movies where things can be fudged to keep it interesting, real naval combat often doesn’t play out like this. Typically, the faster ship can just get away in the open seas. So a PvP naval combat game is going to be iffy.
From this day forward, video game losses will now be measured in units of Concord.
Example: Skull and Bones is 1/2 of a Concord.
Damn what a legacy to leave behind by the Concord devs 😂
It is also a unit for active player count. Hundreds of millions well spent for establishing this unit by sony
why losses? the companies this money went to are owned by the same that own the one that it came from.
the crickets didn't even want to show up
> Skull and Bones (2024) 229 players In-Game
> Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag (2013) 2,587 players In-Game
REKT by their own game . Double REKT.
and thats all time stable since 10(!!!!) years
@@rinkurikara but what doi they even do?
Dayum
@@YaToGamiKuro it's not the same people lmao that's why it's good, people are still experiencing or coming back from years of not playing it and they finish it because it's a good game.
The only thing that can fix this problem: AAAAA games!!
Penta A games baby!
You will literally need devil magic to make the game work.
one A for how much pain it is to play
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
If skull and bones is quadruple A then concord is octuple A
if we be real for a sec, lower budget will make the creators develop the game in more creative ways usually to achieve certain tasks.
unlike today, slap that UE5 engine and raytracing and call it a day.
oh my god HES RIGHT
200,000,000 development cost divided by the peak players of 2,600 means at the peak they paid 76k per active player.
Still better than Concord.
thats only steam, they have "more" players on there own launcher + console players
Absolute cinema
If you account for outsourcing and the whole decade of development, sources say it's actually 650 to 850 millions not 200. Concord was around 400 millions (200 millions before the alpha, 200 millions after)
@@Lograh Lets assume they have 4 times the amount on all other platforms. Its still £20000 per player just for dev cost... Not sure that's really better.
I have a cousin who worked in the Singapore office. This game single-handedly turn his dream of working in game dev to agreeing with his mother when she said decades ago that working in video games would bring him neither happiness nor wealth.
to be brutally honest if you apply / work at ubisoft and call yourself a game dev after ...2015, you need immediate psychiatric help
but in general that sucks for your cousin
😲😲😲
@@leonhardablethey don't call themselves devs they call themselves activists I call them sped
I’m Singaporean, and when old Ubi was good I was thinking to work there and now I’m lucky I didn’t
Time for indie games!
I am a IT project manager. This is a classic "feature Creep" situation. What this means is that when you have a Project like Skull and Bones features are constantly being proposed and added to the project AFTER the design has already been decided. This constant adding of new features, redesigns, re-thinks, second-guessing results in delays, cost overruns, and generally a inferior result. Which is precisely what happened here.
They should have stuck to the original design -single player version of Black flag, which focused only on the naval stuff. When they added "live services" and "narrative driven" and multiplayer and a whole host of unnecessary features they killed their own project.
Hi, what are your thoughts about star citizen? Should I get the game.
Except this project isn't dead and it's still getting better
Nope not feature creep they cut out the fun part. Esp the sea battle from black flag part. And the resource gathering/ crafting part are designed with micro transaction in mind. They are also planning for skin/ship/weapon ingame purchase. Making the game a live service husk.
@@Dabergytvia microtransaction.
@@wp2746its a scam, go play elite dangerous
"Quadruple A" - One A for every player.
All four players must be very mad about this
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
I gotta give credit to them, at least they didn’t explicitly said it had Star Wars potential *(looking at concord)*
How it is even A? I thought it would be F
29:00 .......
Fun fact: Quake 2, released in 1997, has about the same number of daily players.
Also a year ago, they released a remastered version of it with full co-op, graphic update, all the mission packs and some extra and modern system control/ settings options. If you already owned the game before, it was a just free patch.
If you guys feel bad for the Ubisoft staff that used to make the good games in past, dont. Since they were fired long ago, clearly shown by decline in game quality.
I think there was a previous video from asmongold where either veilguard or the assassin's creed game had half of its developers were fresh outta water.
If only they delivered games that players actually want. Anyone remember Beyond Good and Evil 2?
Too many DEI employees were hired to replace the talented devs
They needed to let them go for DEI hires, have to fill out those checkboxes for Blackrock to get better interest rates and massive grants.
This is true. Patrice Désilets, the original creator of AssCreed has made exactly one game since AC:Brotherhood in 2010, and it was garbage. Michel Ancel, the creator of Beyond Good & Evil is a literal scammer. BG&E2 has been in development for 15 years.
It's actually depressing how many games are pumped with millions of $'s... Built for the shareholder and not the gamer, then they scratch their heads why the games tank?! When will they figure it out?
When Indy companies and companies overseas outshines them in every way
Yep it's sad :(
@@A-TALKING-TOASTERthey pretty much do a lot of the time lol
A quick look at Ac: Black Flag will tell you everything about why Skull and Bones failed.
The gameplay, graphics, art style, everything was BETTER in a game 10 years older than skull and bones.
No one liked ACBF when it released. Stop lying to yourself
Ubisoft wanted to cancel it long ago, but Singaporean goverment didnt let them because they had a partnership, and Singapore wanted to produce a AAA game to promote their country and public image of it
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96 what are you talking about it was literally one of the best selling games in 2013 XD
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96Nah man, I lost a friend to AC BF. He was gone for like a whole year. Old school AC fans might not have liked it but it was a massive hit
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96It's my fav one they made but ok
Loyal and true gamers who catapulted Ubisoft into Fortune 500 were taken for granted or abandoned. People who once called us 'losers' cuz we were gamers or loved comic books, now use our tech to make sick money and destroy self-esteem of others. I recently made a video of X360 as the last great generation, hope I'm wrong....
I still think ps4 generation was good, we had great games, but we had a lot of bad things too…
yeah they hate gamers now, because now Ubisoft is full of activists, who are woke and actually hate us gamers, because we want fun, not a crazy, woke ideology
You look like roco magnota
Black flag was such an easy lay up for this game, they could have extended the tech to make this amazing but they fumbled badly. It's truly staggering incompetence and Sea of Thieves came along and beat them to it starting from scratch. They could have taken Black Flag, network the ocean using shared RNG seeds and clock sync, network the vessels, finessed the wave LODs mesh generation for improved inter-ship vis (really the only semi-expensive part). Keep the combat system and construct whatever game mechanics you choose around that core (treasure farming, sea monster raids, and ship upgrades for doubloons etc). It is utterly incomprehensible that they could not get from Black Flag to a decent multi-player experience in 2-3 years, except that their process must have been thoroughly dysfunctional.
You're hired
@@enterpassword3313no shot. He is over-qualified
I think the actual loss is closer to 500.000.000 USD, and due to ESG kickback's and goverment financial aid's, it might be only 200 million...
So, 500.000.000 USD makes sense to why it was called a "Quad A game".
Add marketing into it, they lost around 600 million.
Ubisoft's new strategy to combat piracy is to have people disinterested in pirating their games.
Jokes on you it's working!
Big Brain CEO move
The fact that it's a game about pirates adds another layer of irony to this.
yeah just make it too bad, so people won't even pirate it. Ubisoft has to pay people to play the game. F.e. Asmongold. That's how bad it is.
Underrated comment
Skull and Bone We chased Trends for 8yrs and didnt get a single trend correct
Many publishers/developers have failed to maintain their game engine. The talent who made it possible are rarely at the companies anymore, so you have a bunch of people coming in to try to understand and work around something that they often have little or no understanding of.
Brain drain: the death of towns, countries, and companies.
EVE online has basically collapsed because of this. At one point they tried to turn off the billboards in the game and it broke the entire game for a week 😂
@@OkieDokieSmokie Spaghetti code with poor documentation strikes again!
So they hired incompetent people and fired the actual talent to save money. Go bankrupt already Ubisoft.
is why so many companies are switching to UE 5, and then you still end up with slop that looks like Concord.
My ideal pirate game is an "open sea" mmo, start off just a dude, try to join someones crew or start with a little paddle boat and set out. Island exploration, ai crew that can be found/looted that give small bonuses to ship durabilityj, speed, cannon fire, etc. Hiding loot mechanic (bury your treasure) but when you do that, it generates a map in your inventory, if you die, your map is lootable. Mutiny mechanics. Combat as a pirate would first person.
Yakuza Hawaii pirate game is going to be fun but it is not going to be an open sea MMO. There is also a pirate game MMO(old one)
You litterally just described sea of thieves except sea of thieves isnt an mmo
@@arthurgoonie4596 yea but the ai crew is important to me. Less focused on having to manage the ship, and focus on the fun stuff. But if you want to, remove your crew and have a player crew. My ideal “crew” mechanic would like suidoken where you recruit from a list of 100 or so crew members throughout the world that find through playing. “Finding the best crew for your purposes”. Oh and a Torguga like island for all the dirty pirates to hangout and gamble and other minigames.
@brandonmeyer2327 it wouldn't be hard for them to add that I think they'd just add some board games to sanctuaries and use Skelton ai for crew mates the only problem is sea of thieves is all open these is no safe zones so your ship would get sunk unless they add like really strong non ai skeleton ships to manage people that attack within safe zones but it defeats the point of a pirate game.
@@arthurgoonie4596 Well they could just add a "North India Trading Company" that hangs around towns. Except Tortuga where... anything goes :D. Its just crazy how skull and bones not add ANY of the fun pirate stuff.
AAAA stands for the sound that gamers make before uninstalling this POS forever.
Lol, nice one
yeah shame on Ubisoft!
😂😂😂😂😂
In 10 years, a studio is going to release Ms. Pacman. It will have cost them $400 million dollars to make it.
But it’ll play in 4k at 210 fps!!!
@@louievito5701 Best they can do is 30 fps 1080p after upscaling.
Prices estimate are off "Ms." Pacman will off course have skins for the "modern audience" so double the price to 800m for the extra bloat 😊
@@vytah because making video games is hard!!
This game shouldve been most straightforward release ever, or at least as starightforward as game development can get.
Take AC black flag, remove the assassins creed aspects from it and replace it with a strictly pirate centered story and updated graphics. The gameplay was already there, the crafting system was already there, the ship combat and traversal was already there.
And they fucked it up beyond all comprehension and turned it into a pirate skinned World of Warships. Its honestly impressive really how greed and mismanagement can fuck up so badly on what shouldve been a license to print money. Unbelievable
There's probably Skyrim modders out there that would be able to do that, and more, and it wouldn't take them 10 years. It would be Skyrim though, not AC: Black Flag, but maybe you get the point
At least with world governments the elites get money in their pockets. With modern AAA game development everyone loses 🤦
I was a huge CDPR fan and i still haven't changed my mind on Cyberpunk.
Yes it's flashier today but the main story still sucks, the man who ruined Cyberpunk was the guy so bad at planning they had to cut the part of the game where you work your way up enough with Jackie to even be noticed by Dexter de Shawn. That was the fun part, having a time bomb in your head after the prologue in a character you have no attachment to is just stupid.
You don't know Jackie long enough to care when he dies, what you learn about him at the funeral should be what you learn about him before he dies.
If you think Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game today you are a cat and like shiny things like laser pointers, not story.
Too many people has already forgotten how disastrous CP77 launch.
Even the dlc imo still did not make me care much about V or Johnny
I compleatly agree with you. It would be a miracle if Witcher 4 will be even half as good as Witcher 3. I lost all trust in them.
I remember that before cyberpunk came out, there was a lot of devs that worked on w3 created their own studios. A lot of them.
Good ambitious devs left the company, they had to hire a lot of new people. Cdpr is no longer the same company that created Witcher 3, people who did create Witcher are gone doing their own things.
Based
I can smell the Witcher 4 will be another veil guard for mile away 😂
It’s going to beautiful to watch Ubisoft go under after the inevitable failure of AC Shadows.
Taking pride, or having enthusiasm for people losing their livelihoods is weird. Get off the internet and go outside.
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96I don't like seeing people lose their jobs but then I don't like mediocre games being rewarded either. Because then we will just get more of them
It cant be a failure if it never comes out
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96”those poor scammer lose their livelihoods”
@@SadBoysCollectiveCirca96 Survival of the fittest, nature is beautiful we should appreciate it.
It's crazy when you think about it, AC black flag is probably the best Ubisoft pirate game adaptation. They really spent 8 years. Building a new pirate game with inspiration drawn from AC Black flag, but it was actually worse and less than its inspiration. How do you make less when you had more to start with?
I don't know how they can even call these games 'quadruple A' if they are of lesser quality.
it's about budget mostly
"It’s evolving, just backwards" - Pewdiepie
Depends on how many hands are in the pot
Well audacity is at an all time high. They’ll call it anything that might possibly trick you into buying it for $70-100
It was the only way to retrospectively justify the money they shoveled onto the bonfire to create it. "Quadruple A" is a construction of MBAs who never understood their business or tech, trying to cover for a disastrous and bloated development cycle.
The sad part is that the truly greatest pirate game up to this day is still Sid Meier's Pirates (and that also belongs to Ubisoft).
Imagine, game devs and journo put all their effort into painting us as the villain instead of this.
A bloated market strategy and project management that will never succeed. SMH.
Using concord as a unit of measurement is diabolical
like one Raditz
@@sirken2 Imagine if DBZA had this level of funding
200 players, that's a $1 million customer acquisition cost.
So that means every player is literally a king? They paid more than a mil to draw each one 😂💀
Too bad each player didn't get a million dollars worth of gameplay
So in other words im worth 1 million usdollares
Peak was 2,600 not 200
People think the lowest number on steam is equal to the average number on all platforms. Get a grip. It's a good game. Stay mad 😂
When you are ideologically inclined to push out the "old guard"(mostly talented vets and normal talented people), you will eventually have 150% of the worst talent and junior devs that need heavily babysat to make up for it. I'm surprised half of these games even boot up. Lol
Maybe Quadruple-A is like 4-D and its just so insane we cant comprehend it.
You're right it's just too insane, INSANELY BAD
Time is the fourth dimension...this game took like over a decade to create....Holy Shite!
I’m not sure what’s funnier , them pricing that turd at $70 or just how big of a dud the game is.
Why not both? Irony is stackable debuff
I actually think if you swapped the publisher, the developer, the genre, the price point, the gameplay, and the overall story, this could’ve been a good game.
7/10
IGN secret troll?
Thick of it ahh comment
Nah I don't think so. All they had to do was make black flag 2
Good one :/
I guess they’re just in the thick of it, huh…. But like, everybody knows.
The funniest thing I remember seeing about Skull n' Bones was when, if you're starting a new game, it gives you this spiel about how you need to not cheat, and be kind to any & all players you are with... in a game about _pirates,_ mind you.
Thats actually needed, cause you kids get carried away with video games
Sea of thieves have a similar thing but its more like dont hurl abuse settle it on the seas
5:15 This is the direct result of Diversity Inclusion and Equity doctrine. The best programmers and game devs were pushed out and replaced with yes men and women.
One day someone will realize that they can just make Sid Meyer's Pirates but in 3rd person with black flags controls and we will have the best pirate game possible
We can only dream. I really wanted rockstar to get off their lazy arses and being experimental again to make such game.
A rockstar Pirate age game would be godly
It's weird because ubisoft is known for making massive open worlds and they new everyone wanted another black flag but they gave us an empty ocean world with loading screens and limited land exploration? All they had to do was make black flag 2 and we would've been ok with it. They should've combined AC-3 with black flag but only remove the assassin's creed lore from the world.. not remove entire mechanics and features from their game like parkour and the ability to get out of your ship wherever you want.. so dumb they did that.
Too bad all the employees that were known for making those good games are long gone. Like if they suddenly hired you at ubisoft 5 minutes from now you wouldnt be known for making amazing open world games. Company names dont do anything, its the people working at those companies.
2:00 isnt that hypocrisy? They didnt want to use an already established franchise to do something new, yet they are doing it right now with every other franchise! Tom Clancy with Xdefiant, even assassins creed in a way. Clearly Ubi has no direction at all
Endymion reported that his sources said it actually cost between $650m and $800m. Considering it was billed as AAAA and other AAA games are over $200m, I tend to believe that. Also, IGN gave it a 7/10 lol.
Where the heck did all those money go?? Better game has been made with less money
@@Ozzystrayroo well look at concord that spent $400m. Concord was in development for 8 years while Skull and Bones was 11 years. Let's say that 100 people worked on this and their average salary was 100k per year. Over 11 years that alone is $110m. Now what would happen if it was actually 500 people or 1000?
@@jasonyankovec8541 well it could be, it's just suspicious as heck. And not to mention that the Singaporean government is subsidizing this game.
And here is the thing, i would not be surprised if they probed this one out and find out if UBISOFT redirect some of those fund into their other projects. Because it seems that they only released this bare game just because the Singaporean government threaten to sue them if they did not release the game
Fun Fact: There are curently 372 people playing Assassin's Creed 1 right now and that game came out in 2007. The only AC games that have less are the 3 Chronicles games and the 2 Standalone games Liberation, and Freedom Cry (excluding AC3 bc of AC3 Remastered). All that aside every AC game 18 in total has seen a 33% or higher increase in player count on steam in the past 30 days.
Ac black flag is the best Ubisoft game, absolutely masterpiece nothing will top this game
Only issue the game had was the amount of tailing missions. Rather than that, it was absolutely amazing. Awesome story, characters, combat.
"Skull and bones" was a failure because it was a lie from the beginning. It should have been like a mix from atlas and black flag. Ship design, a crew, a captain, with occasional ports to drop and secure loot. No base building on land. Your ship is your base and the more loot / money you have the bigger your ship and crew. Sea monsters, treasure maps, PVP, pve, and every player would have their own upgrade trees based on what role they chooses. Captain has captain buffs healing skills, cannon crew has cannon / stun / tank light dps / fighting skills, your deck hands have repair skills / long range high DPS / scouting / treasure map skills. It's not hard to envision. You can port islands for raids and treasure. You can port at pirate islands for banking and upgrades. You can sail the open sea and fight various sea monsters for reputation gains and treasures. Basically sea of thieves but larger custom ships and crews with talent trees and unique individual loot like equipment upgrades ark style. Ascendant gear being the top tier.
Im gonna say something wild: i wish we had a modern day assassins creed 1 remake/sequel in the holy lands again. 1980s lebanon-syrian civil wars + palestine intifada era, with the same cities as ac1 but 1000 years later and you could even keep the same storyline.
$50 games were actually a low price point in gaming. There were some NES and SNES games that were $70, $80, even $90 when they came out.
And TOTAL sales were in the ten-thousands for most games. You forgot the scaling of income when gaming becomes mainstream.
9:05 HYPERBOREA MENTIONED
🇫🇮🇰🇷
🇬🇱
A giant building could be built for $200,000,000. This is like building that skyscraper and then having it collapse before you are able to get insurance on the building because there is no such thing as insurance for a failed game. Concord was double that. Crazy.
Wait...if Skull and Bones at $200M was AAAA then wtf was Concord?
Its an AAAaAaAaAaAaAh game
concord was past the level of human comprehension clearly as it wasnt even alive for a day before we had to strip it off the market it was just too good
@@JS06-h5d 🤣
Alleged sources within Ubisoft told TH-camr Endymion that Skull & Bones cost between $650 to $850 million over its 10 years of production.
Ubisoft called it "AAAA", because that's the sound the CEO made when he stepped on a LEGO.
Spending 40 dollars on an atari game like asteroids in the 80s is equivalent to roughly $150+ today. Video game prices always sucked
6:21 when that name was said my chair temporarily levitated
I think he just summoned Cthulu 😂
….they actually had it, the perfect pirate game formula, in AC Black Flag. And they still screwed it up! Ubisoft is on another level of screwing up…
I guess Skull And Bones is all skull and bones now
💀
Ubisoft is completely disconnected from its audience. They have no idea what we want.
"Life is hard. It's even harder if you're Ubisoft." - John Wayne
I get the feeling their hype about taking feedback turned more into common corporate, the feedback we like may get acknowledged, and negative things about our product is on verge of not even getting acknowledged ever existed.
Apparently none of that $200 million was spent on marketing, because I only heard about Skull & Bones after it flopped.
A Friend who worked for Quantic Dream (Also in France as Ubisoft), told me about this game :
1) Skull and Bones was a running joke among the teams.... the game was abandoned many times... the joke was >. Redoing from scratch again and again
2) Everybody knew this is not a AAAA games. But the actionners wanted make the most money they could out of it... so they call it this way. But everybody knew it was trash from the beginning.
3) The Head master of Quantic Dream put his Wife as Manager.... My friend who work on motion capture told me she tell them : >... then 1 year later >... and just couldn't understand a sh.t...
Developers need to step back and get back to basics. Such as developing an actual good story line and stop these live service cash grabs. It’s embarrassing
"Such as developing an actual good story line" - that's the job a story writer. When your story writers are wokey morons, this is the result
9:43 not just that but people wanted it back then, over the course of 8 YEARS now to make games that people end up losing interest!
Wanna know what's crazier? They're still trying to sell the game for like 60 bucks on the PS store
I wouldn't play it if it was free.
Ubisoft lost 200mil$
-190mil$=exec salary
-10mil$=actual game budget
7:17 there it is. No video game related thing with "infinite" in its title has ever turned out well.
Bioshock Infinite
Infinity Blade was good
infinite warfare did actually have a good campaign, i sware its always the robot games man
@@CopperKnight027That wasn't a good game
You must be high. It was an amazing game@@trabant3060
Black Flag is another one of those older games that will make you wonder how massively the industry has regressed and kind of make your jaw drop. We have become totally accustomed to bad and mid games, like music and movies.
Id give this game 1/4 of an A
Problem with the 50 bucks to 70 bucks argument is games in my country went from 40 to 100 bucks and food is more important then games
All they had to do was build on AC4, and leave the boring assassin crap out... But NOOOOOOOO-
Probably because the new devs are so incompetent that they have no clue how to just mainly copy and paste the majority of AC4 code.
Assassin Creed 4 is the peak.
Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5 is the peak of Ubisoft graphics and game design following the third entry.
Origins and Can't speak for ODYSSEY were okay but not great and yet no AC4
Ubisoft is cooked.
AAAA - Avoid Analysis, Act Anyway.
Sid Meier's Pirates from 2006 has 178 players in game right now compared to 196 for Skull and Bones right now. So that's only 18 more than a game from 18 years ago.
...and the core gameplay in the 2006 game was substantially similar to the 1987 edition - great game!
Ah black flag I could listen to those sea shanties all day. Great game. The announcement of skull and bones just seemed stupid. Just make black flag 2 with more shanties 😅
MOAR SHANTIES
I spent most of my time in the game on the ship. It was great. I wish Skull and Bones would be just like Black Flag was but without the AC stuff of course.
Blackflag is still the best AC gameplay. the ship fights were so much fun.
"hiring trash young developers" It's not trash young developers, it's that sociopolitical identity and DEI based hiring is not ideal for quality production. I guarantee there are plenty of young developers (or aspiring to be) who are plenty talented enough to professionally compete but are forced to work in an environment that is also trying to be your social environment to which if you don't fit in or prefer a work environment to be strictly professional (most people) then you'll likely be fired or pressured into quitting. There's a reason why every time a developer says something bafflingly out of touch it always turns out to be the sentiments of the entire developing team, it's because the hiring practices does a better job creating a social group rather than a work force.
You just explained the entire point of the video as though only you understand it, lol
@@Zan_Jayna I commented the moment someone said "hiring trash young developers" like 3 minutes in, I'm literally still watching it.
@@Zan_Jayna So Asmon taking 3 minutes to respond to a comment which isn't even close to the same thing in this comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the 39 minute video is the entire point of the video? Did you even watch it?
blackflag still going strong on steamDB
imagine a 10 year old game beating a "Quadruple" A game
"Lets ignore and insult our fans. Exploit cheap labor in Singapore. Call it AAAA. And charge 70 bucks for it." - Ubisoft most definitely.
Theres no way they only lost 200 on it. It has tp be way more.
Gaming has officially peaked.
I don't even window shop for them anymore.
I'm moving to table-top.
So dumb
Single player and indie games are still good.
a world at war comes out in February
There are still great games.
5:30 I can explain this: the people that make the games are the ones that actually learn and grow and make better games. Those people are gone, so now they are back to 0.
Under a minute gang, where ya at?
5:25 yo
It peaked at 2600?? Holy wow that's low. Suicide Squad peak was at least 10x that and it done.. Infinite greed strikes again.
Whats worse is THEY ALREADY HAD THE BLUEPRINT!
Paid 10 bucks for a copy, I've really enjoyed the PVP quite a bit. Badly set expectations hurt the game a lot. It's not nearly as as bad as the discourse around it, but the Internet loves a dog pile. Still some really wildly bad business decisions around this game but the herd decided it was bad and lots like the comfort and safety of the herd.
I played Skull and Bones in open beta and had a very fun weekend playing it.
Ship to ship combat, simulation of storms, rain, water physics and how combat felt actually was very enjoyable in my opinion.
It's not a great game. Not a bad one either.
From now on the number 400,000 should be known as a Concord
This company can't fail fast enough. Not this game but all they had to do for Crew 3 was update the map of crew 2 but instead they decided to get rid of the one thing that made their game stand out, a fully explorable united states, and did a single island of Hawaii. They're adding one more island with DLC. Idiots.
They had one job. ONE.
Take the ship combat and the combat system out of Black Flag, and then write a NEW STORY. add a new map. This should take around 3 years with a team, because most assets are already written, except new art and the story. Tweak the combat system a bit, tone down the assassination part, and strengthen the martial arts and gun use. Done.
They did fail on an epic level that nobody is able to explain.
How do they go back in time. Studios pushed out old veteran game designers and programmers for the young and inexperienced university grads. With little experience and a low / non existent work ethic tied with the entitlement mentality, how could that possibly go wrong.
About Skull & Bones, they could've just used Black Flag's game mechanic with better graphic, richer storylines, & bigger maps. But they were too busy making everything to do with identity politics, they forgot about it all.
Bro growing up playing Ubisoft games this is crazy they should've stuck to the shit that was working for them
Black flag is 10 years old and beats it in every way still. Also you have Sea of Thieves which beats it in every way on top of that. Who was this even made for?
Passion is core here. Passion will force you to learn what you don't know. Look at RockStar i'd bet money theres quite a few systems in their games that early into development they had no idea how to do but they have passion in the vision of the game. That will drive you anywhere to get that information. These leads quit because they had no passion to learn about the concepts for this project when probably faced with other annoyance being deadlines, annoying bosses or coworkers. Passion will take you through hell, without it you do not give a single F
So, I've just looked - Assasin's Creed IV Black Flag has around 2500 current players!
A game, that has been released more than 10 years ago from the same company has more than 10x people playing it than the company's current release ^^'
Their stockprices tell it all. They've lost all progress they've made in the last decade.
$70 games with premium currency and a battle pass deserve to fail. for $70 i should get all the damn content.
Back then, when I had an SNES a new game was 100.- DM ($50).
Then we got a PC and games for PC where just half the price.
Guess what I did, I switched to PC and never went back to consoles.
Sales on Steam make PC gaming even better, especially when the best games nowadays are indie titles.
ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS TAKE Black Flag, and take out any Assassin's Creed story stuff, write new story stuff focusing on pirate adventures. Done. PRINT MONEY. But they were greedy and their creative directors were clueless... so this is what happened.
Its a pirate ship game... how hard can it be?
I mean you have a Home base, you deck it out with stuff and facilities that help to build better ship(or armada if guild).
Then you add some simple story and make the ship combat with Some kind of meele kind duel. That should be enough for a 7/10 game.
Ubisoft were literally handed a golden goose with Black Flag's ship combat, and they elected to butcher it before it had laid even a single egg. One of the most monumental fumbles in history.
Assassins Creed Black flag is genuinely one of the greatest games ever made, and I feel half of gamers don’t even know it
It's impressive how all these big game publishers make games with huge budgets and teams of hundreds of people, that still somehow end up playing and looking worse than something made by a couple of indie developers, in a cave, with a box of scraps.
It's insane how they failed to make an easy slam dunk. All they had to do was refine the gameplay of AC Black Flag.
Whoever was calling the shots on Skull and Bones had one of the biggest fails in video games history. All they had to do was take the formula from Black Flag, remove Assassin’s Creed from it, and expand upon the pirate aspect of it. How hard is that?
To be honest, multiplayer was always a bad idea here. Unlike movies where things can be fudged to keep it interesting, real naval combat often doesn’t play out like this. Typically, the faster ship can just get away in the open seas. So a PvP naval combat game is going to be iffy.
Pirates of the Caribbean from 2003 literaly was a better game than this, with more features and a lot more fun.
That pretty mutch says it all.
All they had to do was make a AC:black flag game without the AC part....