Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has launched after a few delays, much drama and from a company that feels like it’s constantly teetering on the brink. As such, it feels like how Shadows performs is key to Ubisoft’s future, albeit given its situation, it may not be the deciding factor on where things go from here, either way.

There is a plain question being asked right now, is Assassin’s Creed Shadows a hit? And there are a number of answers being given, with or without context. I’m going to go through just the facts and the context for them to try to answer this.

2 Million Players – This number after just a few days, according to Ubisoft, means Shadows has outperformed Origins and Odyssey over the same time period, albeit not Valhalla, which has been the best-performing entry in series history. So, that’s good. However, it is the case that the numbers are being obfuscated to at least some degree, as 2 million players does not equal 2 million sales, or else they would have said that, with at least some portion playing on Ubisoft’s subscription service. Perhaps not a large portion, but some.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows Steam Numbers – This is being cited more than anything else and is probably the figure that needs the most context. This weekend, Shadows inched past Odyssey with 64,000 concurrent players to its 62,000 over six years ago. So that makes it the best Steam-performing AC game. Valhalla is not an appropriate comparison point, as its 15,000 peak reflects a game that did not launch on Steam until well after its PC release.

Steam Comparisons – Shadows has come in far below a number of other games on Steam that performed somewhat-to-wildly better. But again, context. Some amount of PC players are on the Ubisoft launcher. Some games being compared are cheaper or even free. It’s likely that AC skews more heavily toward a console playerbase than most. And the overall point here is how Shadows has performed not compared to other games, but in the context of the series. It’s better than Odyssey. Odyssey is not considered a failure. So why would Shadows be with on a higher number? That doesn’t follow.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Steamdb

Dragon Age: The Veilguard – I’ll cover this briefly as it’s a game that had a higher concurrent Steam count than Shadows alongside similar scores. It’s true that it seemed initially like Veilguard would be at least some level of a hit, until it was eventually revealed it did about half what EA wanted. I do think that is worth noting. That said, further context is needed if we’re comparing it to Shadows, as Veilguard was a decade in the making, was rebooted multiple times and likely cost far more than Shadows given its development timetable. We also don’t know its console/PC split, which may be different than Shadows.

Two Hour Credits – One somewhat odd point being brought up is that the credits for Shadows run for 2 hours, the implication apparently being that it took far more people to make the game than others in or out of the franchise. There are many issues with using this as a metric. Other games have long credits that no one has bothered to track. Some games do not give as much credit to those who worked on the game as others. Some companies may or may not choose to include every employee or every single member of a location team in a given game. Even scroll speed or how columns are lined up could make a difference. There are too many variables to make a point out of this.

Critic Reception – At an 81 Metascore, that’s about middle of the road for an AC release. But that doesn’t necessarily correlate with sales. The 20 million copies-sold Valhalla had an 80 score.

Shadows

PS

Player Reception – The only scores that matter are the ones from players who actually own the game. So far, that has been positive. Shadows has an 81% Very Positive ratio on Steam. On Xbox it has around a 4/5 star rating. On PS5, which will be its largest playerbase, it has a very high 4.72/5 score. The user score on Metacritic is a 6/10, but again, that does not require proof of purchase to review the game.

Enough To Save Ubisoft? – All of this only has to do with initial launch numbers. It is not possible to predict how this will perform in the long term. Ubisoft has been in such rough shape for such a long time now, that even if Shadows is somewhat of a hit, it may not be enough to reshape its fortunes. Ubisoft is far more than a single series or game, even its biggest one, and it really does not seem like Shadows can or will be the deciding factor.

Conclusion – It would seem that initially, Shadows is a hit somewhere between Odyssey and Valhalla, and player reception is generally positive, on par or even above critics. Its longer term prospects are unknown, though it may not, or probably won’t reach Valhalla’s heights. The future of Ubisoft itself continues to look pretty grim.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.