Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Discover Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, the classic pirate action-adventure game from 2013. Command your ship, hunt Templars and carve your legend as Edward Kenway across the Caribbean's Golden Age of Piracy.
Action AdventureAction RPGOpen WorldRole-Playing
Your like matters. Every heart nudges this game's GamingPickz Score and where it ranks (a small 5% of the score), so the lists get better for everyone.
- Released
- 2013
- Developer
- Ubisoft Romania
- Platforms
- 8 systems
- Critics
- Not scored
- Steam Deck
- playable
- Download
- 30 GB
What is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag?
Discover Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, the classic pirate action-adventure game from 2013. Command your ship, hunt Templars and carve your legend as Edward Kenway across the Caribbean's Golden Age of Piracy.
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 29 October 2013 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Ubisoft Romania, Ubisoft Kyiv, Ubisoft Annecy |
| Publisher | Not recorded |
| Platforms | Nintendo Wii U, PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck |
| Genres | Action Adventure, Action RPG, Open World, Role-Playing |
| Languages | 16 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q6052688, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
Accessibility
Seeing
None declared
Hearing
- Stereo Sound
- Surround Sound
Input
None declared
Difficulty
None declared
Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | Not stated |
| Cloud saves | No |
| Cross-platform play | No |
| Mod support | No official workshop |
| Online play | Single-player only |
| In-game purchases | Yes |
| Steam Deck | playable |
| Download size | 30 GB |
| Add-on content | None listed |
| Age gate | 18+ |
Content descriptors
- General mature content
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag worth it?
88% of 78,523 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. It costs $39.99 on Steam.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag? How long to beat it
Total play time for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is about 62 hours to do everything, and around 23.4 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 23.4h | 1,274 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 41.1h | 2,083 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 62h | 955 |
At its current price of $39.99, beating the main story works out to about $1.71 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag system requirements
The minimum requirements from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag's Steam page. These are what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings.
| Memory | 2 GB RAM (other games at this level) |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core2Quad Q8400 @ 2.6 GHz |
| Graphics | Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 |
| Storage | 30 GB (more games this size) |
Can your PC run it? Check Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag against your exact GPU, CPU and RAM.
Where Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag sits on the grid
Compare the whole catalogueAssassin's Creed IV: Black Flag plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- Multi-platform
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
These are estimates, not reported figures. Ubisoft Romania has not published unit sales for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 78,523 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $39.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If Ubisoft Romania publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $39.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
Latest Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag updates & patch notes
Pulled from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag's own Steam feed on 5 September 2026. Posts marked as from the studio were written by the developer; the rest are articles Steam syndicated from elsewhere. Every one links to its source.
- AC Black Flag Resynced out now!
- Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced: All You Need to Know
- Tune in NOW for the Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Showcase!
- Join us on Discord tomorrow for the AC Black Flag Resynced Watch Party!
- Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced's Worldwide Reveal Showcase TOMORROW! 🏴☠️
- Assassin's Creed: Into 2026
What readers say about Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Crashes and freezes30 of 300 (10%)
mission interact with kenway's fleet map freezing
Steam review, 25 July 2026 · 28 hours played · 7 readers marked it helpfulI also couldn’t use my preferred controller or headphones because, for some reason, they caused the game to crash.
Steam review, 22 May 2026 · 20 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpful - Will not launch or install12 of 300 (4%)
Great classic, but the Steam version doesn't even run anymore after another one of their "updates".
Steam review, 22 April 2026 · 35 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpfulCompletely unnecessary launcher that does not launch the game.
Steam review, 22 February 2026 · 56 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpful - Performance and stutter10 of 300 (3%)
Not worth more than 5e, needless to mention that 40e for a 13 yo game that had 0 optimisation for newer PC's is a SCAM.
Steam review, 21 July 2026 · 1 hours played · 2 readers marked it helpfulOut of the box, the game doesn't even run at a stable 60 FPS.
Steam review, 16 July 2026 · 2 hours played · 2 readers marked it helpful
A further 11 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Did it run on your PC?
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Where Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
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Games like Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
24 games overlap with Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Assassin's Creed III, Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed III Remastered.
Part of the Assassin's Creed series
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is one of 16 Assassin's Creed games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag head to head
See Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag comparisons: vs Sid Meier's Pirates!, vs Assassin's Creed Odyssey, vs Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition, vs Assassin's Creed II: Discovery, vs Assassin's Creed 2, vs Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, vs Assassin's Creed Revelations, vs Assassin's Creed Syndicate
Common questions about Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
What platforms is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag on?
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is available on Nintendo Wii U, PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck. It first released in 2013.
How much does Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag cost?
$39.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag?
88% of 78,523 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
Does Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag as playable on the Steam Deck, from its own testing.
How big is the Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag download?
30 GB on PC, from the storage requirement on its Steam listing. Console versions differ.
Who made Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag?
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag was developed by Ubisoft Romania, Ubisoft Kyiv, Ubisoft Annecy.
Is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag worth it in 2026?
88% of 78,523 Steam reviews are positive (Very Positive), and it is $39.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag on sale?
Not at the moment. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is at its $39.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.
What are the system requirements for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag?
At minimum, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag needs 2 GB RAM, a Intel Core2Quad Q8400 @ 2.6 GHz, a Nvidia Geforce GTX 260, 30 GB of storage, from its Steam listing. That is what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings. Check it against your own PC on the can-I-run page.
How long does it take to beat Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag?
about 23.4 hours for the main story, 41.1 hours with the main extras, 62 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.