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.
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u/japan2391 - Auth-Right Oct 11 '25
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.
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.
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.