Assassin's Creed Shadows a Big Sales Hit in US, Beaten Only By Monster Hunter Wilds

@species That’s the thing that no one seems to realize when they proclaim “see? SEE? Told you it sold/engaged well!” is that Ubisoft still needs to actually make a PROFIT from it.

The amazing amount of money they poured into this demands an equally amazing return on investment. I sincerely doubt that even if it sells as well as everyone thinks it does with the “player” numbers and not “sales” numbers currently being broadcast, it’ll recoup costs to the level they want.

I could be all wet. I doubt I am and I know the spin is very, very in play on both sides. But it’ll be interesting to see how that next financial statement goes. Especially since the credits for the game are, if memory serves from something I read, like TWO HOURS long. That’s…a lot of folks who got a chunk of the budgetary pie…

@species It's because investors are reacting to the news of new subsidiary of Ubisoft and it's seemingly high valuation. Stocks being down have little to do with Shadows success or lack of success.

It's pretty clear that even Ubisoft don't have every answer about news structure of a company. Also, I have a hunch that investors expected that Ubisoft management will get rid of fat (aka employees) which would decrease expenses. And they did not do that. Yet.

So probably safest answer is that Shadows is success, but not such a success that could turn Ubisoft's fortunes in instant. But honestly, only success that could do that is probably Rockstar game level success. Which wasn't possible in a first place.

@species You've made 28 comments about this game in just the last 2 weeks(from the first page of your post history) and were ready to go in this comment section within 5 minutes of it going live and you apparently follow Ubisoft share price daily.

Yet, it seems you don't even like the game or Ubisoft. Bit weird, eh?

First it was "ah but those are just players, lets see what the sales are like!" (as if putting a game on a subscription service for the purpose of attracting subscribers and it doing so was somehow failing), now it's "ah, but sales don't matter because share price."
At this point this game could cause the second coming of Jesus and ensure our salvation from all Earthly ills, and some oik on YouTube would still tell us it failed, because what about unearthly ills?

So the news is that Monster Hunter Wilds has sold better than Assassin's Creed Shadows? Very good!

Don't you just love it when people want something to fail so badly that they'll keep moving the goalpost?

Anyway, I always love it when good games receive good sales, so this is great news. Hope it keeps selling.

@Ryo_Hazuki didn't we already know this? I mean, was there ever any doubt?

Remember when Veilguard had 80k players on steam and was therefore really successful? Yeah.... I don't buy these stories until the dust has settled or there's some actual sales figures.

@naruball @Ryo_Hazuki Wilds has already sold 10 million — 99.9% of games released these days could only dream of hitting even half of that in their entire lifetime!

@Starkei This is literally sales data.

Can we please start actually reading articles before commenting on them? I get it's fun to dump on Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed but some of these comments are worryingly ignorant.

@Starkei These are actual sales figures. Matt Piscatella is the guy who compiles the USA top 20 selling games every month, he has access to the full data set(including digital sales provided by 90% of publishers, Ubisoft are one of them). He’s not allowed to openly publish precise sales figures though.

Glad its doing well as its excellent.

I wish we got actual unit numbers in sales data these days.

I think people need to understand the game selling well is a completely different thing from the games sales being good enough to actually saving the titanic-like company that is Ubisoft.

It would have to outsell GTA VI to have actually saved Ubisoft (in the state that they were prior to the subsidiary deal with Tencent), which was never gonna happen. But that in no way means that the game hasn’t sold very well all things considered.

Nice to see a much needed win for Ubi, I almost didn't buy it because of all the drama running up to it's release. Good to be proven wrong on this one.

Facts have really become irrelevant, haven’t they?

@ChrisDeku i follow videogames quite a lot. Its my hobby.

You can see this trend where game does well, but its not enough for the studio to the point where we see layoff more and more common. The stock didnt move in a favorable direction either, which is weird after sutch a success.
I find that interesting too.

Whats wrong about that?

@Godot25 Thats exactly what ive been saying tho!

@dskatter Exactly, thank you.

@Starkei Why does bloody Veilguard have to come into every AC Shadow comment section.

Woke nonsense means the game will never sell. Go woke and go broke. They are lying to us about sales numbers. That's players not sales! The microtransactions are egregious. It's not selling well enough to save the company.

Where will the grifters go next? We should start a bingo card. Can you imagine the amount of holes in their pitch considering the number of times the goalposts have been moved. It must look like Swiss cheese by now.

The game has clearly done well. Whether it has done well enough remains to be seen. I hope so as I feel like rooting for a the failure of a company that produces many decent games, and employs lots of people in the industry, is utter insanity. It's like these people want the market to retract.

Glad the game is performing well. I'm certainly enjoying my time with it! It's no GotY contender or anything, but it doesn't need to be. The game was clearly designed to cast a wide net, so I doubt many people will think Shadows is amazing, but it's a damn good time. Playing as Naoe is some of the most fun I've had sneaking around in AC.

Glad it's been doing well it seems, the game is just straight up GOOD.

The online discourse for this game has been absolutely ridiculous... Now 56 Hours in, only around halfway through the main story and so far everything about it has been awesome to me.

I'll add that the last time I enjoyed an AC game this much was AC Origins. Finally finished off (the DLCs and 100% of the Trophies) AC Odyssey around a month ago with a total time of around 200 Hours over the span of about 6 YEARS and I can say I thoroughly HATE that game with a passion... It was such a slog (and funnily enough that same team is the one that's made Shadows 😅) never bothered with AC Valhalla because of that, not really interested either since I'm so over Norse sh*t, and AC Mirage was just eh 🤷‍♂️

Hopefully its enough to keep them going. I know they are not making enough money off me. I bought a month of Ubi+ and I'm playing Shadows, Outlaws, Prince of Persia and possibly Mirage. Then cancelling.

What a great game Wilds has been. I'm looking forward to the title update in 2 days!

@graymamba Ubisoft needed right-sizing badly, so the fact that Shadows wouldn't save the status quo is neither surprising, nor a bad thing.

While I'm not wild about Tencent increasing its ownership over Ubisoft, I think the restructure is long overdue.

I imagine Shadows will be vey profitable for Ubisoft, far exceeding the dev and marketing budget. But that doesn't change the fact that Ubisoft is too big and needs to reduce its headcount.

Enjoying ac shadows so far, will probably feel burned out by the end though just like with Odyssey.
This and PoP lost crown definitely seem like steps in the right direction for Ubisoft (even if the latters team were disbanded after the release). People have short memories, capcom at one point was a dumpster fire and they turned it around. Here's hoping ubi can do the same through quality games and learning from mistakes.
Also give me a new Rayman already!

@Jrs1 Because WOKE!!!! Anway, the 2 games are very similar in that a good amount of gamers prayed for their demise based on "those people" being included. The way the goalposts move on this one means no matter what, the naysayers will never just let it be.

@Jey887 Man, I went in so hard about your comment. Then I read the rest lol. I deleted my post. But yeah, "Going woke" just means they've added a character who's a minority. That's all! There doesn't need to be anything political about it. Just if the main isn't a straight white male or a woman they can fantasize about.

Also, no one's ever gone broke "going woke". That's some self-important nonsense they say to make themselves feel far more important than they actually are!

Fantastic Monster Hunter Wilds Sales. Over 10 million confirmed sales is crazy. When Shadows drops to $20-30 in the next couple of months I'll give it a try.

@Wiceheid as if the coming of Jesus would be an argument for such merry folks at all. If anything, he's pretty "woke" by their standards.

@dskatter I mean, most of the people proclaiming "See? SEE?" are just trying to show the controversies surrounding this game have done little to nothing to dissuade sales. We're not over here saying the game will save Ubisoft, or that its presumably immense budget was a wise business decision. In fact, if you ask most of the people that have been defending Shadows and Ubisoft in light of them being targeting by grifters, you'll likely find few have high opinions of Ubisoft or thought there was much of a chance the company wouldn't have had to do some form of restructuring/down-sizing in light of years of failures.

@ShogunRok yup. My thoughts exactly. It's like comparing any game with GTA 5's sales to see if it did well.

@species Stocks don't just move because there was a successful or unsuccessful product. Especially as suddenly as people are asserting they should. The market is based around investor confidence, not tangible success. I don't know why people keep citing this as evidence of Shadows' failure; it really just shows you don't invest or pay attention to the market beyond stroking your confirmation bias.

Literally, go look at how Capcom's stocks fell immediately after Wild's release. Use some critical thinking to consider what other events might be affecting Ubi's stocks. Find any sense in GME.

I'm very happy with the success of Shadows, and I coudn't even buy it yet. In time, I will.

@AhmadSumadi I see, i dont pay too much attention to politics crap when im just playing games.

Glad it is selling well. Having a blast and I am only through Act 1. Got a TON of map left to uncover (and seriously my hitlist keeps growing as I keep stumbling upon some group that’s gotta go).

Such a good game. The hate online is some of the funniest stuff I've seen.

Great game, literally just taking a break from it now. It's on my PS5 Pro in front of me. Nice to see early US sales being as optimistic as UK sales.

The hate on the game is misplaced. There are plenty of games, movies and TV series that absolutely deserve harsh critique and deserve to be failures, and the people behind them deserve to lose their jobs and the investors take a big haircut.

This one ain't it chief.

I also feel that a lot of the hate was actually worked up by the opposing side, who just like the haters, immediately went to war over a game they were never going to buy, and likely hadn't played the predecessors much either.

Those people riled it up by falsely smearing and straw-manning perfectly reasonable and moderate people who were sceptical of Shadows, which in turn caused them to join up with the haters and form a coalition against the game.

There are no good guys and no good "side" in this.

I wonder which game will be in the firing lines of the incels next?

Considering the have had DA and AC recently.

Anyway I’m glad shadows has started strongly and I look forward to playing it in the future

Better than Kingdom Come? Damn, that's impressive!

Glad it’s done well! I’m loving it so far.

Hopefully Ubi see it as enough of a success to not risk good people losing their jobs.

This 'Anti woke" / "go woke, go broke" / conspiracy BS has to end... The people originating it are likely not even into gaming, and wouldn't care if you had no decent games to play!

I'm not sure to understand why there is still this narrative about the commercial success/failure of this game. The fact is that Ubisoft stock is still going down and Tencent is putting money on the new structure that will control IPs like Assassin's Creed. The sad but true reality is that Ubisoft studio has lost control over its own destiny and the one of their games. Even if ACs was a massive hit like MMW, it would not change the ongoing takeover of the company by its stakeholders.

I'm definitely enjoying the game so I hope it's a financial success for UBi.

@Jey887 currently it's the highest selling ubi game on PSN

There's a reason Ubisoft has doubled down on AC in its time of need. It sells well and deserves to sell well. The series has continued to deliver time and time again. I'm really happy to see Shadows break through all the noise and find success. Game is so much fun!

I haven’t finished the main storyline yet but is it ever explained how we can play as two genetically unrelated characters? In the previous games you needed a genetic connection to replay the memories of your ancestors. Was this changed in AC Shadows?

Looking forward to picking this up on sale down the road. I burned out of Valhalla and didn't finish it but it was an enjoyable game albeit repetitive.

@ItsBritneyB_tch To my knowledge you just need access to DNA. If you have that DNA yourself, like Desmond then you are set. If you don't personally have that DNA, but have access to it like in Origins and Odyssey, you can still access those memories. Being able to access both characters in Origins is only possible because the DNA of both characters happen to be in the same location (which I previously thought was a self contained retcon but makes sense now)

Indeed it would seem to be a fundamental premise of the series that anyone can research those memories with DNA, its just that having a living example is easier than trying to find or access it through hosts lost to time. How much of that was a retcon for Origins or not is not for me to say.

Where's the sales number, at this point I think ubisoft just lying to investor about the game success (or lack of) so the publisher stock didn't tank.

@wiiware this info isn't provided by Ubisoft. Move along with your biased takes.

@jerrylongbones Not only is it a ridiculous take, what @wiiware suggests is simply blatant fraud and would lead to serious sentences. Some people just comment whatever.

Anyway, I have no love for Ubisoft's leadership but I do respect their development teams. While I wish they would take more creative risks and think their writing is generally poor, this is clearly a well crafted video game by a team that cares, so it's nice to see it doing well.

@Ainu20 damn a sensible individual who can acknowledge the positive.

I think this is the problem, this whole "your with us or your against us". What happened to supporting a company when they do a good thing and still acknowledge the flaws. Ubisoft is not a good company overall, it hasn't been for a long time but ala most companies these days, they still produce good products and should be commended when they do.

I just hate this ubislop mantra, like nothing they release can be good because its from Ubisoft? Its so based and depressingly ignorant.

@Ainu20 It's not fraud, maybe it's true there's 3 million players but they only "rent" it by subbing to ubisoft subs for 1 month at $15 and finished the game rather than bought it at full $70.

This is microsoft strategy too using "players number" instead of sales when their exclusive games didn't sells as much as sony back then. I still remember "millions of bullet fired" stat for halo 4 or 5, lol.

@wiiware You literally said "lying to investors so the publisher stock didn't tank". Of course that's fraud.

Regardless, your last post has nothing to do with the article, as this is about actual sales and it's not coming from Ubisoft. It's right there in the article, with a linked source and all.

All the best to em, glad to report I'm enjoying the game even the tea party ha which you can skip through if you like 👍 in fact you can skip most stuff I've been playing so far. Not all reports/impressions are correct, the tea etiquette does not take an hour lol and this is misinformation.

@ShogunRok really? How many copies has it sold?