Ubisoft seems to have had a huge success with Assassins’ Creed Shadows.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, they verified that the game experienced the second biggest launch in the series. The top spot still goes to Assassins’ Creed Valhalla, but at 2 million players in 2 days, it outpaced Assassins’ Creed Origins and Assassins’ Creed Odyssey. Note that this information has yet to be officially confirmed by Ubisoft, but it is apparently based on sales information that Video Games Chronicle was given access to.
Video Games Chronicle was also able to verify that Assassins’ Creed Shadows had the biggest day one launch of any Ubisoft title on PlayStation’s digital store, that it was Ubisoft’s most wish-listed title of all time, and that it generated over 11 million hours watched on Twitch. On the latter achievement, Assassins’ Creed Shadows was able to outdo Assassins’ Creed Valhalla.
They also confirmed that Assassins’ Creed Shadows had 27 % of its ‘total activations’ on PC. It’s worth noting that this was the first Ubisoft game to release day one on Steam since 2019. Subsequently, the game did not require that you open the Ubisoft Connect launcher if you bought it on Steam.
Ubisoft shared another message thanking fans, but we thought one paragraph from that message was worth highlighting. They said:
“We couldn’t be happier that this game, set in a location nearly every AC fan and dev has dreamed about for over a decade, has finally become a reality and is now in your hands.”
Indeed, an Assassin’s Creed game set in Japan has been a long time coming. Ubisoft made many smart choices in making that vision a reality. In particular, choosing to have you play a female Assassin with a slim build in Naoe meant that her playstyle would be tweaked towards stealth and technique.
And, of course, they could have made Naoe a bigger woman, or made the Japanese Assassins a male, but this choice allowed them to highlight just how deadly Japanese assassination techniques were in anyone’s hands. And intended or not, adding Yasuke in as a brute force attacker serves to contrast how special Naoe’s characterization is.
Ubisoft has already previously promised that they would be doing more with Assassins’ Creed Shadows, so our hopes are high that we’ll get not only potential expansions, but improvements to raise it even higher in the franchise’s echelons. With that promising launch, Assassins’ Creed Shadows could still turn out to be the most successful game in the franchise in time.
