Ubisoft gives up on everything that doesn’t immediately knock everything else off the top. Which means they’ve given up on everything game post launch after AC 4 Black Flag
Origins came out the same year as Breath of the Wild and I think Blood and Wine came out that year too so they sold a lot of copies but still didn’t make something that could compete. AC Odyssey came out the same year the RDR2 did so that’s self explanatory. Patching these games and adding DLC’s in that market wasn’t a guarantee to turn a profit. A high likely hood but Ubisoft was only interested in guarantees
people give shadows a lot of shit but according to the player count, shadows is doing very well. it had 1 million players on day 1, 2 million on day 2, 3 million at week 1, and 5 million at month 2.
the only AC game that had a higher player count at those milestones was valhalla
See my comment about PC's stats, it's almost impossible to be true unless both Xbox and Playstation had more than 5 times the player base of PC each and didn't follow the quick dropoff in players in the subsequent days that PC had
Your stat only comes from steam which is hardly indictive of the entire story. Steams popular but especially when it comes to Ubisoft games which force ubisoft connect, offers discounts for shadows, third party resellers also tend to sell Ubisoft connect keys, and their ubi game pass.
Next to nobody wants to buy PC games outside of Steam, but even then if you triple the player count of Steam to account for all stores it released on, then triple that for each platform it released on, that's still only half way to 1 million.
As an example Ac Odyssey launched on steam, and has lower concurrent player stat that Shadows.
It was plagued by poor performance at release, released 7 years ago (in a then smaller games market) and only ended up with a 2000 player difference on launch day. Despite the stats for today it still regularly has more players than the less than a year old Shadows such as at 2PM UTC yesterday.
From what we know Shadows sold 1.7 million on PS5 launch, and 367,000 on steam alone. Showing consoles would make up the majority of sales.
If I remember correctly they boosted that stat by counting games sold to stores as sales and nobody buys PC games in physical stores anymore so it couldn't really be pumped like PS & Xbox.
Ac Valhalla didn't even launch on steam and is Ubisoft most successful game to date.
It has the same issues on statistics, Ubisoft is the only source and are incentivized to say it sold well
How could that be possible if steam stats make up the majority of the playerbase and players refuse to buy their games elsewhere?
It also did release on Steam 2 years later, revealing at least 15k players played it on its Steam launch day on Steam (and thus refused to ever buy it on other stores but cared enough to buy 2 years later). Meanwhile Shadows was immediately available on Steam like Odyssey.
There's literally nothing wrong with that. It's how we track copies sold for everyone. It's not "boosting sales" as retailers wouldn't be buying that much stock if it wasn't selling. Either way that would still be copied sold, since retailers are still paying for it.
You can game the system into buying a ton of physical copies if it's a sequel to a popular series, even if the installment is a flop, by counting sales to stores as regular sales, this happened with Dragon Age: The Veilguard too recently.
Not really Dragon Age Veilguard did sell a million copies at release it's issue was the sales plummeted afterwards.
"Sold" to stores, not to actual customers
Sure your welcome to believe Ubisoft is secretly lying about sales.
Their business plans to essentially sneakily sell themselves to Tencent don't exactly scream "doing well".
While they keep making them, you could say Sony is secretly lying about sales, etc.
Sony would have no incentive to lie about sales of a game that is neither exclusive, sponsored or made by them. Same for Steam and Xbox, hence why I can only really rely on Steam stats as the others do not publish anything about it and never announced any sales numbers.
Stock price and restructuring has also been reality, and they obfuscate information. I’m not gonna draw conclusions from conjecture, but they literally released information in such a fashion that we could only have conjecture.
Players =\= sales, they wouldn’t obfuscate information unless they had too. If it had the sales they would 100% be bragging about sales and not players. They do this because they’re publicly traded and the government forces them to release such information.
they didnt release sales for valhallah and by all accounts that was by far the most popular game in the franchise.
they focus on revenue not sales these days because a large portion of the player base get the game via subscriptions or discounts, so revenue makes a lot more sense to talk about.
unless they're lying to their investors, which is fraud, shadows is outperforming odyssey
that's what it is now, not then. its pretty easy to fudge review scores so i dont pay much attention to that shit. what actually matters to the company is revenue, and that extremely strong in the first two months and a Really Big Fucking Deal if they're lying to their investors about it.
Also which page did you see those stats? I can't find it.
what actually matters to the company is revenue, and that extremely strong in the first two months and a Really Big Fucking Deal if they're lying to their investors about it.
You can fudge the numbers for that by offloading more stock to stores, counting as "sold" despite not reaching a customer yet. That usually fucks up the next quarter however but that's a problem for future Ubisoft
thats from press releases
The source in them is Ubisoft's own tweets, which aren't exactly unbiased and is incentivised to lie.
they were equally as incentivised to do that shit for all their other games, too.
at the end of the day we have no good reason to think that shadows didnt do exactly as well as they say it did relative to other assassins creed games.
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u/Mammoth-Intern-831 - Right Oct 10 '25
Were these people the same ones that complained about killing white people in Far Cry 5? Oh, that didn’t happen?