Ubisoft has made a definitive statement about Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Animus Hub.
In a post on the assassinscreed subreddit, Community Manager Ubi_Waldo shared this statement:
“Hello everyone. It has come to our attention that inaccurate rumors have been circulating online regarding the upcoming Animus Hub (ex-codename Infinity). We wanted to take this occasion to clarify that:
- All the rewards available in the Animus Hub will be entirely free.
- There are no paid subscriptions or paid battle pass featured in the Animus Hub.
- Players will have access to regular content & missions at no extra cost.
We will unveil more details about it closer to the launch of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Thank you!”
This statement came shortly after an alleged datamine leaked data from the Animus Hub for the game. That included rumors that it would have paid DLC via a battle pass. You can see that information here. However, since Ubisoft made an official debunking of this rumor, we have to regard that this information may either be outdated, or it lacks context and may create a misleading impression of what Ubisoft is actually offering. You may want to review what of this comes up and gets confirmed after the fact.
As we reported earlier this month, we know that it’s absolutely possible that leakers can get information about video games and consoles that was verified, and it could still be wrong. Leaks are not always useful, not only because plans can change, but because leaks can have only partial information. To be truthful, we should already know the reasons to consider idle gossip as suspect. We hope that recent lesson should be one that gamers learned.
It is interesting that Ubisoft has officially declared that Assassin’s Creed Infinity has been officially rebranded to Animus Hub. We have been reporting on rumors about Ubisoft’s ambitions for Assassin’s Creed Infinity for some time now. It’s possible that Ubisoft has scaled down those ambitions, so once again, everything that we had heard about and reported on it originally may have been thrown out the window.
Ubisoft has been struggling to steer the narrative surrounding Assassin’s Creed Shadows for some time now. So it’s good for them that they can get ahead of the speculation and declare that there won’t be a battle pass or paid subscriptions for the platform. Their announcement does not seem to rule out the possibility of paid DLC. If those are in Ubisoft’s plans, they may be finalizing the details to make sure that fans will be happy with their monetization strategy for it. And that will happen if that content comes with a lot of value, in terms of what’s in each pack, proportionate to pricing.
We can take this piece of news as a positive, since Ubisoft is continuing to take their communication for the game in a good direction. It may not seem this way sometimes, but the fans do want Assassin’s Creed Shadows to be good, and to be one of the reasons that they become happy this 2025. So let’s hope that Ubisoft’s developers can live up to that task in the coming months.
