However, the hole for pirate games has already been filled.
I think it’s not too bad, Sea of Thieves looks and feels imho (from what I’ve seen of it) more like a Fortnite-like experience, both in art style and in revenue model / exploitation. Skull and Bones has a slightly more realistic art style, what we’ve seen of it we’ll have to wait and see the revenue model, but in terms of ‘exploitation’ this looks like so many open world Ubisoft games…
How many people shouted that there was no room for another BR game besides Fortnite, a CoD BR would be doomed, we still have a lot of BR game, Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 is one of them.
It could just be that there are enough people who are not interested in a comic style fantasy pirate game, but are interested in a slightly more historical and realistic looking game.
For me it already has a few points against because it is Ubisoft, but what I have seen from it is that it interests me and we just have to wait for the reviews and streams after release. The movies on Steam for Sea of Thieves were more commercials that made me less interested in the game, until I saw a movie for the Pirates of the Caribbean expansion, enough to get me to check out some more gameplay on YT/Twitch. .