Skull and Bones delayed yet again, a month before launch

Skull and Bones
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Ubisoft has announced that Skull and Bones has been delayed yet again, and will now launch on March 9, 2023.

"While the game development is finished at this stage, the extra time will be used to further polish and balance the experience using players' feedback from our Technical tests and Insider Program which happened over the past two weeks," Ubisoft says in a press release. "This is the right decision both for our players and for the long-term success of the game as March 9, 2023 provides for a suitable release window for this very unique new brand."

An open beta for Skull and Bones will run sometime before launch. The game had previously been set to release on November 8, 2022, just one day before God of War Ragnarok.

Ubisoft officially announced the delay just moments before the publication of a Kotaku report unofficially revealing the news. Kotaku's sources suggest that some developers share fan concerns over shallow player progression in the wake of recent technical tests.

Skull and Bones was first revealed at E3 2017, intended for release in fall 2018. Then it was delayed into 2019, and again into 2021. In 2021, it was delayed into the 2022-23 fiscal year, ending March 31, 2023. A concrete date of November 8, 2022 was announced earlier this year, and while the game won't hit that target, it is still making it out before the end of Ubisoft's fiscal year.

Dig into our guides to video game release dates and all the video game delays for 2022. It's a mess out there.

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Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.