Ubisoft has made a huge announcement regarding Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
They made this post on Twitter:
“It’s not even 4PM here in Canada and Assassin’s Creed Shadows has already passed 1 million players!
Thank YOU from the bottom of our hearts for joining this adventure in Feudal Japan. We are beyond excited to start this journey with you!”
Earlier in the day, they also shared a screenshot showing that Assassin’s Creed Shadows reached the top of Steam’s top seller charts for the day. As of this writing, SteamDB logs that the game reached a concurrent player peak of 41,412 players. Assassin’s Creed Shadows reached all of these achievements less than 24 hours from the time that the game was released.
While we will have to wait for a few days to find out how successful and profitable Assassin’s Creed Shadows was at launch, this was already a positive sign for Ubisoft, and vindication for the Assassin’s Creed developer team.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows reached MetaCritic scores of 85 on Xbox, 81 on PlayStation, and 78 on PC. On OpenCritic, it reached a Top Critic Average of 81, with 82 % of critics recommending the game.
With these metascores, we can see thah Ubisoft missed the chance to make an undisputed GOTY contender. However, this also did not release to negative critical reception either. Assassin’s Creed developer team did enough things right to keep players and critics mostly satisfied.
With a AAA tentpole franchise like Assassin’s Creed, that may have already been enough. Like Call of Duty or FIFA, there is a captive fandom for this franchise. In spite of the seeming negative tenor of gamers online, there are still loyal fans for these games that will buy them no matter what.
In the past, many of these fans were driven away by Ubisoft allowing the quality of the games when they release at launch. In recent years, gamers question game design decisions, which are more of a criticism of the game’s creative and artistic merits. These seem to corroborate that gamers do compartmentalize that from the commercial aspects of these games, such as the expectation that they are sold in an acceptable state of technical performance.
This is mostly good news for Ubisoft as well, but since it’s not a unanimous critical success, it probably won’t be the overwhelming success that the Guillemots wanted it to be. That will, in turn, affect how Ubisoft’s future will be decided. But at least for now, it looks like Ubisoft’s developers themselves did enough to secure their own gainful employment.
