Assassin’s Creed Shadows has hit three million players. The game was released exactly one week ago on March 27. Hitting three million players within a week is no small feat, but Ubisoft really needs Shadows to be a massive hit to save the company.
Part of the difficulty of figuring this out is that Ubisoft has not released actual sales numbers. They’ve announced how many players they have, but a “player” can mean a lot of things. That could be someone that subscribed to Ubisoft+, then played the game. A player could be someone that logged into their own account on their friend’s Xbox or PlayStation, then played the game even though their friend bought it. A player could also be someone that game shares with their friend. There’s a lot of ways someone could be considered a player without actually buying the game. For the sake of this analysis, we’re just going to assume every single player bought the game. We’re also going to assume that every player bought the seventy dollar version of the game, not the extravagant versions that cost up to one hundred dollars. Set up like that, the math is easy enough.
Three million players all buying one copy for seventy dollars each means two hundred ten million dollars of revenue.
To find out if Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the hit Ubisoft needs, let’s figure out how big of a hit they’ve taken recently.
Skull and Bones is one of Ubisoft’s big let downs recently. The game reportedly cost somewhere between $650 million and $850 million to make. Skull and Bones had a disastrous development period. It was first announced all the way back in 2017 and had been in development for years before its official announcement. The game suffered numerous delays and a long period of time in which there was simply no release date. Even worse, the game never hit more than a million players. We’re going to be generous and estimate on the high end. Let’s say nine hundred thousand people played the game, and, to be even more generous, let’s say every single person paid forty dollars for the game. That’s thirty six million dollars of revenue.
Skull and Bones, by my admittedly somewhat flawed estimation, put Ubisoft somewhere between $614 million and $814 million dollars in the hole.
Next up, Star Wars Outlaws.
The current estimations for how much Star Wars Outlaws cost to make is somewhere between $200 million and $300 million. Back in September, it was being reported that Outlaws had sold only one million copies a month after release. Again, because we’re being generous here and the total sales numbers aren’t available, let’s double that number and say Outlaws hypothetically sold two million units and that everyone paid the regular seventy dollar price tag. That’s $140 million dollars.
Star Wars Outlaws, by our very generous estimation, puts Ubisoft another $60 million to $160 million further in the hole.
Third on the list, XDefiant.
This one is trickier as XDefiant was a free to play game. Estimates say the game likely cost somewhere around $80 million. The game was released May 21, 2024, and will be shut down June 3, 2025. That’s about a twelve and a half month lifespan. The highest amount of players XDefiant had in a month was 2.5 million. Because we’re being generous here, let’s say the game had three million unique players. Let’s even say that every single player bought one of the battle passes the game had available which cost ten dollars each. That would bring in $30 million.
XDefiant puts Ubisoft another $50 million dollars in the ever growing hole.
Skull and Bones, Star Wars Outlaws, and XDefiant were Ubisoft’s three biggest releases during 2024. There were some smaller releases like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Just Dance 2025 edition. However, the impact of these games likely won’t be enough to justify counting them in this equation. Here’s the low end of things.
Skull and Bones: $-614,000,000
Star Wars Outlaws: $-60,000,000
XDefiant: $-50,000,000
Assassin’s Creed Shadows: $210,000,000
Add it all together and Ubisoft is still in the hole for $514 million dollars. That’s just the low end. Here’s the high end.
Skull and Bones: $-814,000,000
Star Wars Outlaws: $-160,000,000
XDefiant: $-50,000,000
Assassin’s Creed Shadows: $210,000,000
Add it up and that’s negative $814 million. Geez.
Again, this number and method of finding out how much Shadows has to sell to actually dig the company out of its hole heavily favors Ubisoft. There are quite a few factors that aren’t considered here. The biggest is the cost to actually make Shadows. To be profitable, the game first must exceed the cost of making it. Other factors that are very difficult to calculate are how much merchandise a game sold, DLC content purchased, and, as stated above, Ubisoft+ player count, game sharing, and what version of each game was purchased.
All things considered, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is not the hit Ubisoft needs. However, the game will sell more copies as time goes on.
Luckily for Ubisoft, they’ve formed a new subsidiary to save their best performing IPs and that subsidiary has received an enormous investment from Tencent equivalating $1.2 billion dollars.
Assassin’s Creed has had several comic series that tie into their games. Comic series set in the same universe as the games, but tell a separate story have also been released. There aren’t currently any comics that tie into Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but there is a novel.
What are your thoughts on Assassin's Creed Shadows? Let us know in the comments!