Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced isn’t even out yet – Edward Kenway makes his long-awaited return tomorrow, 9th July – but it’s already on track to perform better than last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

According to estimates by Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis for the games-oriented market data company Alinea, the remake of Ubisoft’s 2013 seafaring classic has already sold over 300k pre-order units on Steam ahead of this week’s launch, equating to “almost $14m in gross revenue”.

That, Elliott notes, means Resynced has sold 5.39x more copies on the PC platform than Shadows did during the same pre-release window. As for consoles, Elliott added, “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”.

Shadows, for context, has shifted 5.7m copies globally to this date – 1.3m of those on Steam – falling some way below 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which had sold 10m copies as of March 2020. Viking-centric follow-up Valhalla was also a significant hit for Ubisoft and enjoyed considerably longer post-launch support compared to Shadows.

Black Flag Resynced’s arrival comes amid reports Ubisoft is already working on a Resynced version of 2007’s original Assassin’s Creed. As for the game itself, Eurogamer awarded Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced three stars in our review, calling it a “perfectly fine way of experiencing this tale” even if some of the new additions and changes “are not universally positive”.