Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced sells 2 million copies in 1 day …

I gotta hand this one to the suits: I thought gamers might find a $60 price tag on a rehash of a 13-year-old Assassin's Creed game to be a bit much, and apparently I was wrong. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced sold more than two million copies in just one day, and has handily surpassed Steam player counts of newer games in the series, including Assassin's Creed Shadows.

"Dash my Buttons... Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has already passed 2 million copies sold!" Ubisoft wrote on X the day after the overhauled Black Flag launched. "Whether you're sailing with us again, or stepping aboard the Jackdaw for the first time: THANK YOU from the bottom of ARR hearts."

It's notable here that Ubisoft refers specifically to two million copies sold, as opposed to the "one million players" it used to characterize the success of Assassin's Creed Shadows in its first day of release. As Joshua Wolens noted at the time, it left us uncertain as to how Shadows was really doing compared to Valhalla, although Ubisoft later said Shadows had put up the "second-highest day one sales revenues in Assassin's Creed franchise history."

A more straightforward comparison can be found in the concurrent player numbers on Steam, where Black Flag Resynced stands head and shoulders above the rest. Here too, some differences need to be accounted for: Ubisoft had a years-long no Steam dalliance so Valhalla didn't arrive on that storefront until a couple years after its debut on the Epic Games Store, and Shadows was weighed down by coordinated culture war nonsense over the presence of the Black samurai Yasuke. Shadows also costs $10 more than Black Flag Resynced.

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Still, it's about as close to apples-to-apples as we're going to get, and the numbers make it clear: Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

(These are ordered by their all-time peak concurrent player count.)

"Black Flag has always held a special place in the heart of the community, and ours." Assassin's Creed brand boss Martin Schelling said. "Bringing it back with Resynced was a promise to that passion for Edward’s adventures, and to the unique sense of freedom players experienced back then. Seeing two million players set sail on day one, along with the great reviews from critics, is the greatest reward we could have hoped for."

Amongst all the news of brutal layoffs, studio divestments, and ironic task force appointments at Microsoft this week, over in the Call of Duty corner of the megacorp, something kinda cool happened. Activision released updated ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops 2 (2012).

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They come with caveats, of course: At $40 a pop, the Call of Duty tax is firmly affixed to these elderly shooters. They're also PlayStation only, sadly, so the millions of fans who originally played them on PC are cut off from the reinvigorated scene. But they are nearly complete updates of those original games, now upscaled to 1080p, with few exceptions. Players were especially surprised to learn that even the emblem editor—a beloved and somewhat controversial feature of Treyarch's early games—made the cut.

Because, well, people are making swastika emblems with it. And depictions of 9/11. And Charlie Kirk's assassination. And a KKK member. And that's just all that fit into this tweet from influencer JakeSucky.

As you can see, the emblem editor is surprisingly powerful—its stock of primitive shapes, symbols, colors, and layers let dedicated thumbstickers depict just about anything. Most often, custom emblems ended up looking like the trash bin of an early South Park animator, but it was a regular occurrence to glance at a profile and be treated to a remarkably convincing Mona Lisa, cartoon character, or yes, something naughty.

I'm also quite surprised the feature made the cut. Even with player moderation, there's no policing photoshop, so a tool that allows for high expression assumes that sometimes your killer will flash you with cartoon racism. There are normal, cool, creative emblems being made as well, but in keeping with the Call of Duty community, terrible behavior is more the norm.

As others have pointed out, they should've done the work to let people turn off custom emblems entirely—there wasn't an option back in 2010 and there isn't one now.

Weirdly, the only major change to the ports is the omission of some modes. Wager matches are gone from Black Ops 1, so clearly developer Iron Galaxy did some surgery here, but you won't find modern options like FOV sliders or high refresh rates. Pretty barebones ports, all told.