Two summer games due to make a BIG splash
An Assassin’s Creed remake and an early-access farming sim are both shaping up for solid summer success.
Today we’re turning the telescope onto sea and land, tracking two titles arriving soon: Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced (out this Thursday, 9 July) and Fields of Mistria (in early access now, hitting its 1.0 release on 5 August).
Let’s walk the plank and dive in.
Black Flag Resynced is on track to be a much-needed hit for Ubisoft
Ubisoft has historically leaned on remasters over full remakes, but it now has a few proper overhauls in the pipeline. Alongside the troubled Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake and Rayman Legends Retold, first out of the gate is Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced.
It’s a ground-up remake of 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, still widely considered the peak of the franchise. And while Assassin’s Creed has been a console-first property, it’s been gaining some ground on Steam. For context, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has sold 5.7M copies globally, splitting 53.6% PS5, 23.8% Steam, and 23.6% Xbox.
Resynced looks poised for a hearty PC showing, already clearing 300K copies sold on Steam ahead of launch, worth almost $14M in gross revenue.
Resynced has already outsold the entire Steam lifetime run of Ubisoft Singapore’s previous pirate venture, Skull & Bones, before it’s even out. And our estimates have Black Flag Resynced tracking far above AC Shadows on Steam pre-launch, too.
At the same two-days-out milestone, Resynced has sold 5.39x more Steam copies than Shadows did in its equivalent pre-release window. For reference, Shadows has since reached 1.3M lifetime copies on Steam.
Nostalgia will trickle to word of mouth and success
Ubisoft priced this at $59.99. Pricing a nostalgia-driven remake below the new industry ceiling is a deliberate accessibility play, maximising the addressable audience for a lower-risk title rather than squeezing margins per copy. It’s the same logic we argued Rockstar used with GTA 6’s $80 base, applied at the other end of the scale.
To understand the pre-launch velocity, look at why the 2013 original became a milestone:
Released in a cross-gen transition, Black Flag shattered the rigid urban constraints that had begun to stagnate the series. It was one of the few PS4 games worth owning at launch.
Black Flag was also a pirate game first and a stealth-assassin game second.
Players fell for the freedom of it, dropping the Jackdaw’s sails, the crew bursting into sea shanties, swinging from high-seas cannon battles to raiding tropical plantations.
Edward Kenway was a protagonist departure too, a flawed, charismatic privateer initially driven by greed and freedom rather than strict ideological duty (and Kenway is from Swansea, like a certain awkward Welsh analyst you may know).
Black Flag was a much-needed change when the wider franchise was drowning in its own modern-day lore.
Folks are already primed to love this one.
Ubisoft needs this
From an industry lens, Black Flag Resynced is a timely strategy for a struggling Ubisoft. After a turbulent few years of costly development, delays, and high-profile misses (ironically including Skull & Bones, which spun out of Black Flag’s own naval tech), Ubisoft is dealing with fractured pipelines. Building an unproven new IP from scratch is a six-to-eight-year gamble costing hundreds of millions.
High-fidelity remakes of beloved legacy titles are the low-risk alternative – and one Ubi hasn’t really leveraged much yet. Such remakes reuse a universally praised design blueprint, lowering creative risk while guaranteeing a built-in audience.
For a publisher mid-transition, these remakes are a financial cushion, stabilising the balance sheet and winning back investor and consumer confidence while the long-term bets bake.
It’s the same catalogue logic we’ve tracked elsewhere, including with Capcom’s remake-fuelled so-called flywheel. Proven IP is the lowest-risk money in a risk-averse industry.
Because Black Flag carries so much nostalgia for the PS4-era crowd who remember it as a definitive day-one title, we expect it to perform even better on PlayStation than on Steam, too.
This is something I’ve been referring to as the amortisation of nostalgia (sorry). In other words, remakes allow a publisher to extract fresh, high-margin revenue from IP whose brand and design were paid off a decade ago (the remake has its own, theoretically smaller new production cost, though).
There’s also not too much happening in July, aside from College Football releasing on the same day (which might cannibalise some AC console launch sales in the States). And Halo 1’s remake also launching this month, too.
We’ll be back next week with the full launch data for Black Flag Resynced (and later with Halo!), including a deep dive into console copies sold. Hit subscribe below to get it as soon as it drops.
That’s sea sorted. Now onto land.
Fields of Mistria is carrying the Stardew Valley torch
Fields of Mistria is entering 1.0 next month after two years in early access, and it has the potential to be the next big indie farming sim. It obviously won’t outsell Stardew, though.
Stardew Valley is indie royalty. Since launching a decade ago, Stardew’s sold over 50M copies and comfortably north of half-a-billion dollars, and it’s still going strong, adding another 4.2M copies this year alone.
A decade-old flagship still shifting millions a year suggests this genre has some demand to … farm. So Fields of Mistria isn’t really fighting Stardew for a fixed slice of players, it’s stepping into an audience that’s still growing, with the appetite for more cosy farming sims clearly nowhere near sated.
The cosy farming-sim genre, done right, is fertile ground (ayy) for pulling in a huge, loyal audience. And one upcoming game ticks all the same boxes, with smart quality-of-life tweaks and a cosier 90s-anime style on top.
Fields of Mistria has now sold 1M copies on Steam since its August 2024 early-access launch, generating around $11M. It hits 1.0 on 5 August at just $13.99, with no planned price rise.
Where Stardew has a lot of time pressure, mandatory end-of-day saves, and automation (sprinklers), Mistria trades all that for a more relaxed, magic-infused loop, save anywhere, jump, swim, cast utility spells, and a heavier emphasis on dynamic town life, group dialogue, and animal breeding.
Yes, I play a lot of these kinds of games. And I think the cosy gamers will bloody love this one. Every single month this year, between 15% and 30% of Fields of Mistria’s 700K wishlisters have played Stardew Valley that same month, too:
These aren’t idle wishlisters who clicked once and forgot.
They’re active, engaged farming-sim players getting their fix elsewhere.
When Mistria leaves early access, every one of them gets a wishlist notification, at a $14 impulse price, for a game in the exact genre they’re already playing monthly.
At under an hour’s wage in most Western markets, there’s basically no financial friction. Mistria flips from a considered purchase to a no-brainer impulse buy. This also threads a needle we’ve been banging on about: wishlists are increasingly a vanity metric, and they’re essentially useless for AAA.
But a cheap price, a proven 1M-owner early-access base, and a wishlist cohort demonstrably active in the genre are exactly the conditions under which wishlists do convert. Some of the top wishlist converters of the year have been these sort of budget indies, as we covered in our recent client-exclusive newsletter:
It’s not the size of the list that matters; it’s who’s on it and how engaged they are. Mistria’s list is the good kind.
Mistria has an established 1M-strong community, a proven concept, a distinct cosy-gamer identity, and a genre leader still selling millions a year. Fields of Mistria has a real shot at breaking out at 1.0.
Marketed right, with the cosy-game streamers who turned Stardew and Stardew-likes into comfort staples, this could be one of the summer’s quiet success stories.
We’ll be back to break down the wishlist conversion, 1.0 sales, and more when Fields of Mistria leaves early access next month. Hit subscribe below to get that in your inbox when it’s ready.
So there we have it: two very different games, in very different genres, both tracking for big summers. One a nostalgia-fuelled remake doing the heavy lifting for a publisher in transition, the other a cosy indie with the most primed conversion funnel we’ve seen in a while.
Land and sea, both shipping soon.
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