Ubisoft outperforms expectations, but delays Skull & Bones again

Financial report for the first half of FY 2024 is out

Marco Wutz | Oct 27, 2023

Ubisoft outperforms expectations, but delays Skull & Bones again /

It’s the season of earnings reports for the first half of FY 2024 and Ubisoft’s numbers look pretty positive. The company stated that it vastly outperformed its own expectations for Q2 with €205 million more in net bookings than the forecast said.

Ubisoft revealed that this good news came about through a mixture of strong releases as well as good earnings from the company’s back-catalog and live-service games. Both Assassin’s Creed Mirage and The Crew Motorfest have had excellent launches, according to Ubisoft, and tactical shooter Rainbow Six: Siege is continuing to grow even eight years after it was first released.

Bad news, captain: Another delay is on the horizon / Ubisoft

However, it’s not all positive: Ubisoft also changed the release window of Skull & Bones once again, pushing the pirate game’s launch back for a remarkable sixth time. The PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S title had a closed beta test in August 2023, but it looks like that showcase was not confidence-inducing enough for the developer and publisher to make the game available. Skull & Bones now has a FY 2024 Q3/Q4 release window, meaning it should be out by the end of March 2024 – not going to put a bet on that one, though.

Ubisoft lists Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, Just Dance 2024, Prince of Peria: The Lost Crown, Rainbow Six Mobile, The Division: Resurgence, and XDefiant as other games that should generate revenue in that period. XDefiant was supposed to be out in October 2023, but was indefinitely delayed after disappointing public tests. It looks like Ubisoft expects to ship the game in the next six months.

The company also communicated that it had delayed another big title currently in development, but it’s unclear which one it’s talking about – it could be a game from the Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry series or Star Wars Outlaws, though the latter didn’t have a release date outside of a vague 2024 window anyways.

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Published Oct 27, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg