The number of Xbox players sailing through the Skull and Bones achievements has been dwindling since Ubisoft’s “quadruple-A” game launched in February, with our data showing that Skull and Bones has steadily lost 90% of its Xbox players. Season 2 is now on the horizon, packed with new content and quality-of-life improvements, but will it be enough for Ubisoft to claw back the community?Skull and Bones Xbox players have sunk considerably since launchIn a recent blog post, Ubisoft revealed some of its plans for Skull and Bones Season 2, which adds ship upgrade features for stat improvement and new perks, ways to assign ships to manufactories via fleet management, new game modes for PvE and solo play, and more — you can read more details in a follow-up blog. Ubisoft also says that due to the “tremendous response” from Skull and Bones’ community since launch, the team has managed to make a host of changes to the game throughout Season 1, as well as see how players engage with the end-game content.”Let us begin by saying how amazing it has been for all of us working on Skull and Bones to witness the tremendous response from our entire community since the launch of our game,” Ubisoft says. “From the ways our players engage with our game and content, to the ton of screenshots, videos, and livestreams shared across social media, Discord, and Reddit.”It is thanks to your incredible engagement, that we were able, throughout Season 1, to observe, listen, understand, and more importantly react to your feedback on a weekly basis. Our commitment continues to remain the same – to create and update our game together, with our community. This wouldn’t have been possible without the passion and dedication you’ve shown to Skull and Bones.”Unfortunately, it’s unclear just how large the Skull and Bones community is right now. Ubisoft has said that Skull and Bones has the “second-highest” engagement across its portfolio, with players averaging around four hours of daily playtime, but again, this doesn’t tell us just how many players are actually playing. Skull and Bones has had a rough start since launching into early access on Xbox Series X|S and other platforms on February 13, losing a third of its Xbox players just two weeks later. Season 1 arrived pretty soon after launch, so it would have been difficult at the time to say if it could save the game, but since then, Skull and Bones has continued to slowly see its player base on Xbox sink. Looking at our Gameplay Chart data, which pulls information from 2.4 million random Xbox accounts, the week after our previous report (week ending March 11), Skull and Bones had lost another 26% of its Xbox players, continuing the trend. Fast forward to this week’s Chart and Ubisoft’s announcement for Season 2, Skull and Bones is currently the 221st most-played Xbox game with an Xbox playerbase 90% smaller than its launch week pool of players.Of course, this is just Xbox data and doesn’t speak for PlayStation and PC — although, our TrueTrophies reports a similar fate befalling Skull and Bones on PS5. As for PC, it’s unclear how many players are still sailing the seas as the game is only available via Ubisoft Connect and the Epic Games Store.Considering that we’ve not seen Skull and Bones increase its player base in any way since launch, it appears that Ubisoft will need a miracle if it hopes to encourage pirates to return to the game. While Season 2 certainly sounds like it has some great new additions on the way, the consistent loss of Xbox players suggests that it’ll likely not be enough to turn the AAAA ship around.Ubisoft has committed to a full year of post-launch Skull and Bones content spread across four Seasons, so there is plenty of time for the team to entice players back.
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