For first time in years, Ubisoft doesn’t delay Skull & Bones

Ubisoft has completed its annual conference call to investors without delaying Skull & Bones—a major milestone for the publisher’s perennially pushed-back pirate adventure. Instead, the company has confirmed plans to release the title during this fiscal year, which wraps up at the end of March 2023.

Usually a game not getting delayed wouldn’t qualify as news, but it’s worth noting just how big of a deal this is. Ubisoft first announced Skull & Bones at E3 2017, with a planned launch in late 2018. In May 2018, however, it announced in an investor briefing that the game would slip into late 2019 or early 2020. In May 2019, it pushed the game yet again to sometime after March 2020. Technically, the May 2020 call went off without another year-long delay, but only because Ubisoft had already announced it to investors during its third-quarter briefing in the previous October. Then, in May 2021, it returned to its usual clockwork schedule, announcing plans to launch Skull & Bones between April 2022 and March 2023.

Shockingly, that window held during this year’s investor briefing. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reiterated that Skull & Bones will launch in the next 10 months, mentioning it alongside a few other titles that the publisher had already been pegged for that window.

“For 2022-23 we look to return to significant topline growth,” Guillemot said in a statement (PDF link). “It will be mostly driven by a diverse line-up of premium games, including Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Skull & Bones, as well as other exciting titles.”

There you have it. We may be taking to the high seas in less than a year. Then again, there’s still a lot of time left for another delay.

So far, Ubisoft has announced Skull & Bones for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC. It’s unclear whether that platform list has changed since we last saw the game.