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Just three days after its release date, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has hit yet another milestone and passed 2 million players. According to Ubisoft, “Assassin’s Creed Shadows has now surpassed the launches of AC Origins and Odyssey.”
Shadows had already sailed past 1 million players in its first 24 hours, easily breaking AC Valhalla’s record. To put that into perspective, when Valhalla released in 2020, Ubisoft claimed it was its biggest PC launch ever (although the game’s Steam playerbase remains smaller than other games in the AC franchise). Five years later, Shadows seems to have eclipsed even that.
This record-breaking wave of players at launch is thanks in part to the fact that Ubisoft didn’t wait to release Shadows on Steam—Valhalla didn’t arrive on Steam until a full two years after its original release date. That may explain why Valhalla has far fewer players on Steam than Shadows, Odyssey, and Origins, which were all available on Steam at launch.
At the time of writing, Shadows’ all-time peak concurrent player count on Steam is hovering at just over 60,000, within spitting distance of Odyssey’s record of 62,069, but far beyond Origins (41,551) and Valhalla (15,679). If Shadows continues to attract new players at this rate, it could pass Odyssey’s record in a matter of days.
In fact, Shadows is on track to be one of the biggest game releases of the year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was hailed as a hit earlier this year and took two weeks to hit 2 million players, a milestone Shadows reached in just a few days.
Shadows’ success is a much-needed win for Ubisoft, which had a rough year in 2024 and was relying on Shadows to turn things around. After a string of flops like Star Wars Outlaws and Skull and Bones, Shadows is a breath of fresh air that couldn’t have come at a better time.
Ubisoft is reportedly in talks with Tencent to invest in a new IP unit that will include the Assassin’s Creed franchise. This deal could give Tencent, already one of Ubisoft’s largest shareholders, an even bigger hand in controlling future Assassin’s Creed games. Shadows’ success may help bolster Ubisoft’s confidence and hold off a full-on ownership change at the company (which has also been rumored) for the time being.
Players don’t seem to have been deterred by the culture war “controversy” drummed up in the lead-up to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which saw predominantly western influencers and other commentators spreading a racist reaction to Black samurai co-protagonist Yasuke through complaints of “historical accuracy”— despite the fact that Yasuke was a real person and the first Black Samurai. These so-called history buffs are suspiciously quiet on The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise.
Both Ubisoft and the Assassin’s Creed subreddit ultimately said enough is enough, refusing to give the outrage cycle more oxygen. The game has received mostly positive reviews, including 81.7% of Steam reviews at the time of writing.
PC Gamer’s Morgan Park gave Shadows a score of 80% and focused on the actual gameplay rather than the debates surrounding Shadows’ representation and Ubisoft’s financials, stating, “As analysts ready their takes on what Shadows means for the future of the industry’s old giants and their giant open world games, I’ve got a simpler question to answer: Is Shadows fun?
I’m so glad that one is an easy yes. Shadows is some of the most fun I’ve had with a stealth game in a decade, and impressively, it also has the best, stickiest combat this series has seen.”
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Kurt Indovina
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