Report: Assassin's Creed Shadows Had the 2nd Biggest Launch in Franchise History - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 24 March 2025 / 3,355 Views
Ubisoft on Saturday announced Assassin's Creed Shadows has surpassed two million players, which is faster than Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
New data seen by VideoGamesChronicle reveals Assassin's Creed Shadows had the second biggest day one sales revenue in franchise history. Only Assassin's Creed Valhalla had a bigger launch.
Assassin's Creed Shadows also reportedly had the highest ever day one launch for any Ubisoft game on the PlayStation digital store and was the most wishlisted Ubisoft game in history. It generated over 11 million hours watched on Twitch, which is the strongest start for any recent Ubisoft game, including Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
PC activations also accounted for about 27 percent of total activations and Steam played "a significant role" in the PC performance. It is the first Ubisoft game to release day one on Steam since 2019.
Assassin's Creed Shadows released for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC via Steam, Epic Games Store, and Ubisoft Store, and Amazon Luna on March 20.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.
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Very impressive! Especially considering AC has always been a holiday season release.
The incels will be heartbroken.
Weird how the internet would have you believe the game is an utter failure and put Ubi 300M in the Red...
AC isn't my thing at all but I'll be picking this one up on a sale for sure
Sometimes, the internet is wrong.
Only losing to a game released 1) During the holidays 2) For a new console release 3) During peak covid is insane.
Sounds very popular. Never played one but I'm hearing good things about the ps5 pro version.
I was thinking more about the height of popularity of the previous gen than the launch of the current one, but I guess both of them must've helped. Regardless, this is very impressive indeed.
I'd also like to add that despite being a highly requested theme, I wouldn't be surprised if fewer people found this theme appealing than many other themes in the series before.
Haven't played any AC game before, but seeing the gorgeous environments in this one reminds me of Ghost of Tsushima, which I haven't played in about 5 years now.
So this will probably be my first AC game. Looks fun. Especially playing as Naoe since I preferred the assassination approach in Tsushima.
I guess the controversies worked out in their favor.
I'm boycotting till they release beyond good and evil 2.
I'll wait for official numbers. I heard enough bullshit from Veilguard reporting. If anyone has actually played it, microtransactions play a heavy part in assassins creed shadows.
Christopher Dring has said it has done better than star wars outlaws, but well short of valhalla.
Dring is referring to physical sales in the UK only. He doesn't have access to digital sales in any region yet.
Micro transactions has always been in AC games but it's not forced. The rpg games of AC requires grind and people these days don't like that the grind., so it's there for those people. You can get all gear and accessories without buying the micro transactions. The article on the website says that in just France it sold 120k units which is 12 times higher hen veilguard..
Alinea Analytics predicts 1 million copies sold between Steam and PlayStation 5.
Producer Marc-Alexis Côté says Shadows need to sell between 8 and 12 million just to break even.
He said he's trying to steer the Assassin’s Creed franchise through that. Which could include things like the retail price, a more reasonable development budget, or marketing budget, microtransactions, getting more sales digitally which yields higher revenue, etc.
If they sell microtransactions for $35, that about equals what they make from 1 physical copy at launch price.
Probably less if you count the cost of producing the disc, box/cover, storage/shipping, etc.
Engagement doesn't mean shit if the game doesn't make them money. We'll see how this develops.
Still noo sales data..
Valhalla never got any official sales data either. It was only player numbers and revenue information. You can't get sales numbers anymore because all of Ubisoft's games are also put on their Ubisoft+ subscription service day one.
People are just going to have to get used to less and less actual sales information.
Oooo oke
How many assassin's creed games have officially announced sales data? That's not really a Ubisoft thing.
In the 7th gen it was pretty common for them, for instance we know that AC1 sold 1.1 in the first week, 2 did 1.6m in the first week, 3 did 3.5m, and 4 did 1.4m. Starting with the pretty big flops that were AC Unity and AC Rogue, Ubisoft stopped releasing 1st week sales data for the AC series. They told us that Origins doubled the first week sales of Syndicate, but we don't know the first week sales of Syndicate, only that in the UK Syndicate was the 2nd lowest selling game in the series up until that point, above only Rogue.
Ever since then we have gotten more generalized sales statements from Ubisoft instead of hard numbers. They said Odyssey's launch topped Origins, that Valhalla was the biggest launch in the series (so bigger than 3.5m of AC3 presumably), and that Mirage's launch was in-line with Origins and Odyssey. Now they gave us a somewhat more concrete number than usual for them of 2m players in less than 2 days for Shadows, and we have this report that the launch day revenue was the 2nd highest in the series behind only Valhalla).
The reason companies give player numbers over sales data is because that is what their investors ask for
They don't care about playing some fanboy Twitter game... If their investors start asking for sales data instead, then that is what we will get
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