'Assassin's Creed Shadows' Sees Peak Player Counts Decline By Nearly 30% In Second Weekend
Assassin’s Creed Shadows saw its peak player counts decline nearly 30% in its second weekend following release.
In its most recent 24-hour peak on Steam, Assassin’s Creed Shadows only hit 46,125 players. That’s a 28.8% decline from the game’s peak concurrent player count of 64,825, which it hit on Sunday, March 23rd, the first Sunday following the game’s release.
For comparison, Dragon Age: The Veilguard hit a peak concurrent player count of 89,418 players in its first Sunday, November 3rd. In its second Sunday, the game fell to a peak of 61,063. That was 31.7%.
The game’s publisher Electronic Arts (EA) would eventually admit the game was a commercial failure and missed sales expectations by nearly 50%. The company stated, “Separately, Dragon Age engaged approximately 1.5 million players during the quarter, down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.”
Ubisoft has not provided any sales data for the game as of yet, but it has attempted to portray the game as a success by touting the number of players.
On March 27th, the company stated that the game had achieved over 3 million players, had the second highest Day 1 sales revenue in Assassin’s Creed franchise history, and had the biggest Ubisoft Day 1 ever on the PlayStation Digital Store.
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However, total players is not the same as total sales and even all sales are not equal given the game is available to play on Ubisoft’s streaming service Ubisoft+, which only costs $17.99 per month.
To highlight that, analyst Rhys Elliott shared data from Alinea Analytics that indicated the game had only sold about a million copies total between Steam and PlayStation by March 22nd.
Even with the game hitting 3 million players it is still has a long ways to go to break even. Based on comments made by Assassin’s Creed Executive Producer Marc-Alexis Cote who revealed AAA games like Shadows have to sell between 8 and 12 million units just 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.”
Côté 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.”
He 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,” Côté added.
What do you make of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ player count decline?
The best part of Ubisoft is already being spun-off into a new subsidiary for easier sale. This will leave the main company to die slowly. I haven't purchased an Ubisoft game in 10 years and I regret that one. Good riddance.