Ubisoft's biggest launch in years is a 13-year-old game — and pirates beat its DRM before it even shipped

Ubisoft has spent a couple of rough years, so the studio will happily take this: its full remake of 2013's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, launched July 9, 2026, sold more than 3 million copies in its first week and peaked at over 99,000 concurrent players on Steam — the highest ever for any Assassin's Creed game on the platform. It's the publisher's biggest launch in years. The catch, and it's a real one: the game was cracked before it even came out, using a technique so dangerous that security researchers are telling people not to run it.

The comeback: Ubisoft's safest bet is its own back catalog

The remake earned an 85% on OpenCritic — the highest-rated Assassin's Creed since the 2013 original — and topped the Steam premium chart over Palworld and EA's College Football 27. There's a strategy hiding in that success: a struggling Ubisoft just proved the lowest-risk move in gaming is remaking a game people already loved. Black Flag was always a fan favorite; rebuilding it on the modern Anvil engine is a far surer thing than a brand-new $200-million gamble. Expect more of it.

The DRM story: Denuvo lost, and the 'win' is scary

Denuvo is the anti-piracy tech publishers bolt onto big PC releases. For Black Flag Resynced it failed before launch — a playable cracked build circulated up to a month early. But this wasn't a normal crack that patches the game's executable. It used a hypervisor bypass: running the game inside a modified virtualized environment to fool the DRM. The problem is that to do this, a player has to disable core Windows security features — which is exactly the kind of thing malware wants you to do. So the anti-piracy tech is now, in a real sense, more dangerous to defeat than the crack is worth. The leak reportedly traced back to an internal Ubisoft production build, not Steam — which is its own uncomfortable story about where these things come from.

Put the two halves together and you get a genuinely modern picture of a big PC launch in 2026: enormous legitimate success and a pre-launch crack that only 'works' if you make your PC unsafe. Black Flag Resynced is both the best week Ubisoft has had in ages and a case study in why the DRM arms race keeps producing worse outcomes for everyone.