Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows only managed to hit a peak concurrent player count of just 41,412 players on Steam on the game’s release day.
As reported by SteamDB, Assassin’s Creed Shadows hit a peak player count of 41,412 around 7:30 PM EDT on March 20th.
For comparison, Dragon Age: The Veilguard had hit a peak over 70,414 in around the same time frame after its release. It would go on to hit an all-time peak concurrent of just 89,418.
Electronic Arts would later reveal the game did not sell well and missed the company’s targets by nearly 50%, “Dragon Age engaged approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.”
CEO Andrew Wilson explained, “Dragon Age had a high quality launch and was well reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.”
While these Steam numbers look abysmal in comparison to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Ubisoft did reveal the game had achieved over 1 million players in its first day.
The company announced on X, “It's not even 4PM here in Canada and Assassin's Creed Shadows has already passed 1 million players!”
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However, it’s unclear what this number means given it is quantifying by players rather than units sold. This is of import given Ubisoft has a subscription model called Ubisoft+, which drastically reduces the price of Assassin’s Creed Shadows from $69.99 to $17.99 with the hopes that players will continue with the monthly subscription.
Furthermore, Assassin’s Creed Executive Producer Marc-Alexis Cote noted back in October that the game needed to sell between 8 to 12 million units in order to break even.
He explained, “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.
On top of this, an alleged Ubisoft employee informed French-language site BFMTV that the game needed to sell very well in order to succeed.
He said, “If the game does moderately well, we're in real trouble.”
“If Shadows sells very well, we'll be able to start breathing a sigh of relief,” the employee added. “Already, if it sells like Odyssey, which is the 2nd best-selling game of all time, we'll be happy.”
Ubisoft did note that ahead of the game’s release that “pre-orders are tracking solidly, in line with those of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the second most successful entry of the franchise.”
When asked for more color on that, CEO Yves Guillemot shared, “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.
What do you make of the game’s peak concurrent player count on Steam? What do you make of Ubisoft announcing the game has achieved 1 million players on its launch day?
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When hits like Black Myth Wukong or Monster Hunter release, they are measured against perpetual million-concurrent-players games like the CS. The fact that this rubbish is being measured against Failguard tells all that people need to know, I think.
I have around 50 people on my Xbox friends list. None of them have played this woke garbage game. Big difference from Valhalla which around half, including myself played on launch. Odyssey was the same. Lots played that.