A new rumor alleges that Ubisoft has sold around 300,000 pre-orders for Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
According to Tom Henderson at Insider-Gaming, “Shadows currently has around 300,000 pre-orders.”
He went on to reveal that the most recent Ubisoft release, Star Wars Outlaws “had less than half the pre-orders Shadows currently has in the same time period before launch.”
Henderson also compared the pre-orders to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey noting that game sold between 400,000 to 450,000 copies by its release day.
This information comes in the wake of Ubisoft declaring in its third quarter sales report that “pre-orders are tracking solidly, in line with those of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the second most successful entry of the franchise.”
During the company’s conference call, Frederick Duguet also indicated that the Assassin’s Creed brand and franchise at-large was doing well. He explained, “[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.”
Assassin’s Creed Mirage only hit an all-time peak of 7,870 concurrent players when it released in October 2024 and fell to below 500 concurrent players on a number of days throughout November.
Later in the conference call, Duguet and CEO Yves Guillemot were asked about the pre-orders by Nick Dempsey from Barclays. 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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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.”
Furthermore, Assassin’s Creed Executive Producer Marc-Alexis Cote shared just a couple of months ago that Assassin’s Creed Shadows needs to sell between 8 million to 12 million copies.
During an interview at XDS24, 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 rumor that pre-orders for the game are around 300,000?
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Odyssey is the 2nd-Best-Selling in the series' history, but with only 1.4 million copies sold in its First Week, it ranks 8th in the series. That's less than Unity and Origin, and less than half of the 3.52 million copies of Assassin's Creed 3, which is the 2nd place. Valhalla as known as 1st.
This means Odyssey's Pre-Orders numbers are very low than others, which means that when Odyssey's Pre-Orders numbers are similar to Shadows' Pre-Orders numbers, it actually means that Shadows' Pre-Orders are very low too.
Why anyone would play this series anymore is just beyond me. It has no direction whatsoever and killed off a lot of its most interesting characters while retconning half the lore. Did they tell people upfront there is no social stealth in this game? Because that is one of the pillars of AC.