Alleged Ubisoft Employee Says If 'Assassin's Creed Shadows' "Sells Moderately Well, We're In Real Trouble"

An alleged Ubisoft employee revealed that Assassin’s Creed Shadows must be a homerun for the company or it will be in real trouble.

An anonymous and alleged employee spoke to French-language site BFMTV and informed it, “If the game does moderately well, we're in real trouble.”

The employee added, “If Shadows sells very well, we'll be able to start breathing a sigh of relief.”

The employee would go on to provide more color, “Already, if it sells like Odyssey, which is the 2nd best-selling game of all time, we'll be happy.”

Alongside this employee’s comments, BFMTV reported that the development team at Ubisoft Quebec is optimistic about the game’s potential.

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That seems to coincide with the front that Ubisoft executives put up during its most recent third quarter sales reports and the accompanying conference call. In the report the company noted that “pre-orders are tracking solidly, in line with those of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the second most successful entry of the franchise.”

Chief Financial Officer Frederick Duguet said, “[In regards to] the back catalog the Assassin’s Creed franchise performed strongly throughout the quarter highlighted by the Steam release of Assassin’s Creed Mirage confirming that the brand is in great shape.”

On top of claiming that the entire brand is in great shape, CEO Yves Guillemot provided more color on the game’s pre-orders responding to a question from Braclays’ Nick Dempsey. He asked, “Was Odyssey the second biggest revenue generating game or was it the second biggest unit sales generating game in its early months, first quarter, whatever works? I’m just thinking it had more in-game spending than previous Assassin’s Creeds. I’m just thinking what our pre-orders might mean for our first 12 days of Shadows units sales.”

Guillemot replied, “Odyssey is the second biggest performer in the franchise’s history, very close to Valhalla in terms of units sold on the comparable time basis. At the time when we launched Odyssey it set a new benchmark for the franchise. So it was a very successful first week. So that’s what we can say at this stage.”

“And when we look back Odyssey has been accumulating 40 million players to date. So it’s been really a great success. So what we see as a pre-orders benchmark is encouraging,” he concluded.

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In the middle of February, it was rumored by Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming that the game’s pre-order had hit 300,000. He claimed that Odyssey had sold 400,000 to 450,000 copies by the time it released.

The game is currently the 41st Most Wishlisted game on Steam with just 31,797 followers according to SteamDB. However, it is currently the 7th game on Steam’s Top Sellers list as of writing.

It is likely the game will have to sell around 10 million copies to break even given that Assassin’s Creed Executive Producer Marc-Alexis Cote revealed during an interview that AAA games like Assassin’s Creed need to sell between 8 and 12 million units to break even.

He said, “When you look at who succeeds, at least in the AAA space-. So what I’m going to say applies to like mostly premium games, more traditional kind of AAA games. You have 10 games in any given year that will sell about 10 million copies,” he continued.

He then explained, “The reason I’m quoting the 10 million copies kind of mark is from what I’ve seen and how I’ve seen costs, our costs, and costs of competitors, and everybody—. Everything leaks in our industry so you have privileged information on where the competition is going. But mostly I estimate that 10 million copies give or take 2 million copies is mostly what you need to break even. But you have only 10 games that breach that every year.”

Côté then broke down what those 10 games look like, “Out of those 10, you’ll have probably three sports games. You’ll have four games on established franchises and probably 2 or 3 games that are surprise hits coming from nowhere. But that leaves very, very little room and wiggle room for success.”

“So I’m trying to steer the Assassin’s Creed franchise through that,” he added.

What do you make of this alleged employee’s comments?

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