Ubisoft has a lot of cause to celebrate as Assassin’s Creed Shadows may have become their most successful title in the entire franchise.
Over the weekend, they made this announcement on the official Assassin’s Creed Twitter account:
“2 MILLION PLAYERS!
We’re thrilled to celebrate this incredible milestone!
Assassin’s Creed Shadows has now surpassed the launches of AC Origins and Odyssey. Thank you for joining the journey in Feudal Japan!”
The day before this announcement, they revealed that the game already hit 1 million players within the first 24 hours. If not today, we think that Ubisoft will make another announcement sometime this week updating us on its player count.
And Ubisoft would not be able to just share a metric like unit sales to reveal the game’s success. While Assassin’s Creed Shadows is not on Game Pass, it is on Ubisoft’s own Ubisoft + subscription service. So there is a number of players who got the game as part of a subscription, instead of making a full retail purchase.
There are other external indicators of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ success. As indicated on SteamDB, the game reached a peak of 64,825 concurrent players over the weekend. This is the higher concurrent player count any Assassin’s Creed game has reached on Steam.
Finally, the dev team shared a message to their players on the Assassin’s Creed subreddit. They said this:
“This weekend, many of us on the Dev Team spent time reading your reactions across the Assassin’s Creed subreddit — and we just want to say thank you. The sheer amount of love and positivity we’ve received has been incredibly heartwarming.
We came across this post in particular: https://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/1jhpbax/thank_you_to_the_assassins_creed_shadows_team/ — and it really moved us. Seeing your excitement, your thoughtful reactions, and your joy has meant the world to us. After years of hard work, there’s nothing more rewarding than watching the community connect with what we’ve created.
While we don’t reply directly, please know we’re listening. The entire Dev Team has been reading your posts — the celebrations, the feedback, the theories — and it’s been inspiring. It fuels us. And it helps us keep improving.
Thank you for being part of this journey with us. This is just the beginning for Shadows, and we’re thrilled to see the game evolve with you by our side.”
As we explained last week, just because Assassin’s Creed Shadows did not attain unanimous critical acclaim, does not mean that it must have been a failure. That simply made things a little bit harder to predict. Now, we know that Ubisoft managed to pull everything together well enough to make more of their players happy than unhappy.
Even with its somewhat contested execution, the fantasy of an Assassin’s Creed game in feudal Japan proved too enticing for fans to pass up. Everyone is free to like or not like a game, and in this case, this success proves that Naoue and Yasuke have proven to be two very popular Assassins indeed.
