How successful is Assassin’s Creed Shadows really? What we know about sales and player numbers

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The latest Assassin’s Creed installment is considered a game of fate for Ubisoft. Although the company does not provide any concrete sales figures, the player statistics indicate success.

A week and a half has passed since Assassin’s Creed Shadows of Ember was released, and it looks like Ubisoft has achieved considerable success, despite all the prophecies of doom before the release. Just two days after launch, the developers were able to proudly announce that Shadows of Ember had already surpassed the sales of its predecessors Origins and Odyssey, with two million active players.

In the meantime, the Japanese adventure has even broken the three million player mark. 27 percent of these are on PC, where the game reached a peak of around 65,000 concurrent players on Steam during the launch weekend. But how much do these numbers really tell us?

How meaningful are player numbers?

Because player numbers cannot be equated with sales figures. Not every one of the more than two million players of Shadows has also purchased the full version; the share of Ubisoft Plus subscribers in these figures is not yet known. These subscribers pay around 18 euros per month and get access to new Ubisoft titles from launch day.

At the same time, Ubisoft needs every euro right now, because Shadows has to be a financial success for the struggling publisher. The current fiscal year has been disastrous for the French company. In recent months, there have been repeated rumors about the sale of company shares to the Chinese publishing giant Tencent.

Ubisoft is officially remaining silent about the exact sales figures for Shadows. However, an internal memo, which the US magazine Variety has obtained, reports the second-best sales start of any Assassin’s Creed title; only surpassed by AC Valhalla in 2020. On the PlayStation Store, Shadows was even the best Ubisoft launch ever.

Why is Shadows less successful than Valhalla?

The shortfall in sales compared to Valhalla does not come as a surprise to Ubisoft management. According to an internal communiqué, it was even to be expected because AC Valhalla was released in the fall of 2020 in the midst of a perfect storm in which many factors for the game’s unique success came together:

  • For one thing, Valhalla was released at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when many people were already sitting at home and more willing to invest time and money in new video games.

  • In addition, the game also runs on more platforms than Shadows In addition to the versions for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series, Valhalla was also offered for PS4 and Xbox One, which means a significantly larger potential console customer base.

  • And finally, Valhalla was released on November 10th just in time for the start of the Christmas shopping season , a time when potential customers are more likely to part with their money anyway.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows doesn’t have any of this.The fact that the game is still selling so well proves that Ubisoft has apparently struck a chord with the action game’s Japan setting. And the community reactions also speak for themselves in this regard. One week after release, the game has 11,000 reviews on Steam with a very positive rating (82 percent).

The GameStar community also sees the 14th Assassin’s Creed installment in a positive light. In our recent survey of your first impressions of Shadows, around 70 percent of the participants gave the Japanese offshoot a good or excellent report. So it seems that with Shadows, Ubisoft is finally back on the right track after a few missteps.

Whether that is enough to pull the ailing publisher out of the crisis remains to be seen.