Skull and Bones Ubisoft's pirate sim wasn't very good when I tried it: a mishmash of systems that weren't particularly thrilling and were interrupted by various live-service things anyway. Sean Prescott's review of Skull and Bones got 68%, but Tyler Wilde just wanted to see what was going on in Sea of Thieves. All in all, not an enthusiastic recommendation.

Still, Ubisoft continues to try. After a free week and a second season of the game, the company has finally announced that Skull and Bones has completed its long journey on Steam and will be released on August 22; the Steam page is now live, and the game will be available for purchase on the Steam website.

Perhaps not enough to turn me into a rabid Skull and Bones fan, but it surely won't hurt the game to be released on a platform where I won't silently resent having to boot up every time I play it. Then again, I will be launching Ubisoft Connect from Steam.

If you're one of those rabid dogs who played the game an average of four hours or more each day back in February, rest assured that all your hard-earned progress will carry over. In a subsequent tweet, Ubisoft tells interested punters that “Skull and Bones supports cross-progress, so your progress will be saved to your Ubisoft account. In short, as long as your Steam account is linked to the same Ubisoft account you've been playing with, you can resume right where you left off. After you repurchase the game, anyway.

Frankly, I'm curious to see what the user reviews are. At the risk of sounding like an idiot, the game has in fact been running quietly since its release five months ago. What is going on there? In a live-service game like that Forbidden Kingdom, it's surely shaken out by now, except for the most dedicated players” Perhaps an update will make it a genuinely good game and it will appear on Steam with glowing user reviews.

Or maybe not, and we'll find out what is still bugging people about this game in its second season. Either way, it will be interesting.