'Assassin's Creed Shadows' Barely In Top 50 Of Most Wishlisted Games On Steam A Week Ahead Of Its Release

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is barely in the top 50 of the Most Wishlisted Steam games just a week ahead of the game’s release.

According to SteamDB, Assassin’s Creed Shadows currently sits in 48th spot and it is behind a number of other games that do not arrive until later in March, April and even towards the end of Summer this year.

Not only is the game in 48th spot, but it only has 29,596 followers on Steam.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows is trending behind upcoming games such as The First Berserker: Khazan, which is currently the 43rd Most Wishlisted game and has 34,013 followers, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is the 37th Most Wishlisted game and has 44,797 followers, DOOM: The Dark Ages, which is the 15th Most Wishlisted game and has 58,323 followers, and Borderlands 4, which is the 9th Most Wishlisted game and has 71,711 followers.

While the game is trending behind these other titles, there is a glimmer of positivity. It is doing much better than Star Wars Outlaws before it arrived on Steam. That Ubisoft game only had 5,869 followers a week before it released. On its release day it went up to 7,168. As of writing, it has 31,312.

However, that game was a commercial failure for the company with Ubisoft admitting that the game’s sales were “softer than expected” and that it “underperformed sales expectations.”

Despite the poor trend for Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Steam, Ubisoft was bullish on the game’s commercial prospects back in February.

The company declared that “pre-orders are tracking solidly, in line with those of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the second most successful entry of the franchise.”

CEO Yves Guillemot was asked about the pre-orders by Nick Dempsey from Barclays. He asked during a conference call, “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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Dempsey then asked a follow-up on whether pre-orders correlate to actual sales in the current environment compared to 2018 when Odyssey released.

Guillemot replied, “What we can see for the curve that we’ve been observing after just re-opening the digital pre-orders of [Shadows], it’s really supportive of what we cannot see. But, of course, the bulk pre-orders for the next five weeks is still ahead of us. So what we can see today it’s really positive. And, of course, we’ll continue monitoring this.”

Duguet then added, “And there are plenty of indicators we look closely at to see how the game is expected by our players.”

A rumor from Tom Henderson at Insider-Gaming also claimed the game had sold 300,000 pre-orders.

However, 300,000 is not anywhere near what the game needs to sell to break even. Assassin’s Creed Executive Producer Marc-Alexis Cote revealed back in October that the game likely needs to sell around 10 million units.

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 Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ ranking on the Most Wishlisted Steam games?

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