Source: Ubisoft / Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is doing numbers, giving Ubisoft a much-needed win.
Take that haters. After plenty of rumbling and hoping Assassin’s Creed Shadows would be a massive flop for Ubisoft, the highly-anticipated next chapter in the Assassin’s Creed franchise is already a hit.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows reached 2 million players three days after its release. According to a post from Ubisoft, “Assassin’s Creed Shadows has now surpassed the launches of AC Origins and Odyssey.”
This milestone follows after Shadows reached 1 million players in the first 24 hours of its release, easily eclipsing AC Valhalla’s record. According to Ubisoft, Valhalla was the biggest launch on PC when it was launched in 2020.
We zap five years later, and Shadows seemingly smashed that record.
What also could have contributed to that record was that Shadows was launched on Steam from day one and immediately verified for Steam Deck use. It took two whole years for Valhalla after its original release to land on Steam.
Currently, Shadows’ all-time peak concurrent numbers on Steam are at 64,825, officially putting it past Odyssey’s 62,069 but easily blowing past Origins (41,551) and Valhalla (15,679).
If Assassin’s Creed Shadows continues at this pace, it could become one of the biggest releases of the year. To put things in perspective, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which was a very well-reviewed title, took two weeks to hit the 2-million player mark; it only took days for Shadows to reach that goal.
Ubisoft Finally Gets A Win With Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Shadows’ performance is a much-needed win for Ubisoft, which has been reeling thanks to commercial flops like Star Wars Outlaws and Skull and Bones. This could be the shot in the arm the video game developer has been looking for.
It also showed that all the social discourse around Shadows, specifically about the game’s dual protagonist, Yasuke, the Black Samurai, and Naoe, the female shinobi assassin, didn’t matter in the end.
Hell, it might have even helped the game sell.
Who knows.
Well, we loved Shadows and wrote in our review of the game that “Assassin’s Creed Shadows is an exceptional entry into the franchise that brilliantly combines all of the good features from the games over the years and stuffed them into a game that doesn’t require you to play 100+ hours to complete. It’s so good that you want to spend as much time in its world as possible to uncover more of the story because it’s absolutely worth it.”
Congrats to the Ubisoft team for the successful launch. You can see more reactions in the gallery below.