Skull & Bones' Release Has Thousands Flocking To Assassin's Creed: Black Flag

thegamer.com:

Skull & Bones hasn't gotten off to the greatest of starts, coming out of the gates to middling critical reviews and even worse user ratings. While it can be difficult to put too much stock in user reviews these days, the general feelings of dissatisfaction are also being felt in the game's player numbers, as a recent report has claimed that Skull & Bones has failed to crack the one million player mark, even though Ubisoft offered everyone an eight-hour free trial.

There is one silver lining that has come about from the launch of Skull & Bones though, and that's a pretty huge number of people flocking to Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag to get even more pirate action. First spotted by PCGamesN, the player count for Black Flag has risen quite drastically over the past few days, having previously averaged a peak player count of around 1,000 pretty consistently before the release of Skull & Bones.

Take a look at the game's SteamDB page now, and you should notice a sharp rise in players on February 16, the day on which Skull & Bones was released. That number has risen even higher over the past few days, hitting a peak player count of 3,226 during the weekend after the launch of Skull & Bones.

At the time of writing, Black Flag's highest peak player count in recent years came yesterday, with 3,594 people replaying or experiencing Edward Kenway's life story for the first time. In fact, that's the game's highest peak player counter since October 2020.

That's quite a surprising increase, and one that has likely come about due to the price of Skull & Bones. It's a big deal for a lot of people to drop $70 on a new game, especially one as disappointing as Skull & Bones has turned out to be, so it makes sense for people to seek out alternatives if they're up for a pirate adventure.

While Sea of Thieves is probably the more relevant title, Black Flag is probably the closest you'll get to a more grounded and traditional pirate adventure, even with it being over a decade old, so it