Skull and Bones costs $70, or your local equivalent, and that’s a hefty price tag for something that bears the trappings of a live-service game, including an in-game store, battle pass, seasonal events, and premium currency. But Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot defended the cost in an investors call today, saying the high price is warranted because it’s a “quadruple-A game.”
Guillemot’s statement came in response to a question from an analyst, who suggested that the price point “could presumably limit the size of the player base.”
“You will see that Skull and Bones is a full-fledged game,” Guillemot replied. “It’s a very big game and we feel that people will really see how vast and complete that game is. So it’s a really full triple-A, quadruple-A game that will deliver in the long run.”
Guillemot’s response—”It’s a good game!”—is to be expected. What’s interesting is the fact that the Skull and Bones price tag has come into question in the first place. I’ve listened to a lot of investor calls over the years and I don’t recall ever hearing a specific pricing decision questioned like that. Discussions of industry-wide trends, like the rise of the free-to-play model or when Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto said in 2023 that “game prices are too low,” are common enough, but “Why are you charging so much for this one game?” is something else entirely: It’s an implicit criticism.
Publicly, Ubisoft has high hopes for Skull and Bones. It’s one of two “premium” games Ubisoft is releasing in its fourth quarter, alongside Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Guillemot said it “has the potential to establish itself as a new live experience over the long term.”
We’ll have a sense for how that’s going to work out soon enough: The pre-release open beta is live now, with Skull & Bones finally set to launch on February 16.
Correction: The story originally indicated Skull and Bones costs $60, it’s actually $70. Yowzah.