The day gamers have been eagerly waiting for has finally arrived, Ubisoft’s latest installment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Shadows, set in feudal Japan and pits the player as a historically insignificant Black man, fictionalizing him as a make-believe Samurai warrior serving Oda Nobunaga.
For months on end since it was announced Assassin’s Creed Shadows had been engulfed in controversy one after the other, and after two subsequent delays the day of reckoning has finally arrived and the one sole question gamers are asking is whether or not it lived up to expectations or somehow defied the odds to be a financial success.
First things first, it has almost been two full days since the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a game so enameled in controversy the Japanese themselves are looking to pursue legal action due to Ubisoft’s sacrilegious depictions of temples and shrines, some of which that are featured in-game are still maintained by respective local families and were not contacted or consulted about the inclusion by Ubisoft, who allowed the player to indiscriminately attack and desecrate them in-game.
Of course, none of this seems to bother the usual suspects in access media and games journalism. IGN, GameSpot, VGC, TheGamer, PCGamer, EuroGamer, and GamesRadar are tripping over themselves to hand out glowing reviews. I’m talking 8/10, 9/10, and even perfect scores from some smaller outlets.
This situation bears a striking resemblance to the critical reception of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Despite receiving widespread acclaim from journalists and social media activists for its emphasis on inclusivity, highlighting pansexual companions and the depiction of transgender top surgery scars, the game ultimately fell far short of commercial expectations and only continued to expose the ideological bias of journalist outlets and those who conduct reviews.
Electronic Arts (EA) notably refrained from disclosing actual sales figures, instead referring only to “player engagement,” a vague metric influenced by the game’s availability on EA Play, which initially provided a limited trial. Four months after launch, its performance was so underwhelming that EA effectively offloaded it to Sony, where it was included as part of a PlayStation Plus promotional offering.
You might notice a familiar trend in the reviews for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which is being called a “return to form” just like the media’s glowing praise for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The irony here is that Assassin’s Creed Mirage had already been acknowledged as a return to the series’ classic style, yet that fact seems to have been conveniently forgotten.
Now, the standard for praise appears to be less about gameplay or authenticity and more about celebrating Shadows simply because it marks the franchise’s first setting in Asia, although it doesn’t actually feature a real Asian protagonist.
Let’s put aside the glaring favoritism for a moment—the so-called journalists, who are really just political activists in disguise, getting their early copies, exclusive access, and a nice little ego boost. The real question is: did Assassin’s Creed Shadows actually sell?
Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that critical praise doesn’t always mean financial success. A bunch of “they/them” reviewers getting free game keys doesn’t mean real gamers are actually opening their wallets.
And the verdict? It’s looking rough, especially on PC. The game randomly dropped four hours early, whether that was Ubisoft once again screwing things up or a calculated PR move is anyone’s guess. But for a franchise that’s sold over 200 million copies since 2007, you’d expect a strong launch.
Instead, early Steam stats suggest Shadows is off to a pretty grim start.
With a peak of just 47,616 concurrent players on Steam, no wonder people are saying Ubisoft tried to strong-arm Valve into hiding third-party Steam API data. While concurrent player counts aren’t the same as raw sales figures, this is still a weak showing for a major Assassin’s Creed release from a company like Ubisoft.
The number might climb to 50,000 over the weekend, but for a massive AAAA game that’s been in development for years, offering dozens of hours of content it’s still pitiful. When factoring in all regions and non-peak hours, Assassin’s Creed Shadows may have sold around 90,000 copies or possibly fewer on PC before accounting for review keys and refunds.
Ubisoft has stated that delaying and further refining Assassin’s Creed Shadows would cost them an additional 20 million euros. Hypothetically, selling 90,000 copies on Steam alone, an ambitious figure, would generate $6.3 million USD at a $70 USD price point per copy. However, Valve imposes a 30% fee on Steam sales until a game surpasses certain revenue milestones: the fee drops to 25% after $10 million USD in sales and further reduces to 20% after $50 million USD.
If we assume Ubisoft sold 90,000 copies on Steam at $70 each, the $6.3 million in revenue would be reduced by Valve’s 30% cut, leaving Ubisoft with approximately $4.4 million USD. This figure is optimistic, as Steam’s global platform often employs regional pricing, significantly lowering the cost in many markets.
The $4.4 million in revenue isn’t even close to covering the 20 million euro delay cost, which is about $21 million USD, let alone the game’s full development budget. Given that this project involves hundreds of developers across multiple studios and outsourcing partners, production costs are likely well over $100 million USD. Relying on Steam sales alone wouldn’t come close to making a dent in that amount, the game needs to sell millions of copies across all platforms to break even.
And it’s not like PC players make up a tiny portion of the audience. Even assuming PC accounts for just 20% of the player base and consoles take the remaining 80%, that would mean Assassin’s Creed Shadows has only sold about 450,000 copies in total. At a $70 price point, that’s roughly $31.5 million in revenue before even factoring in platform fees like platform fees.
To put its figure of 47,600 concurrent players into perspective, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has only slightly surpassed the peak of Assassin’s Creed Origins (41,551) from 2017, while significantly trailing behind Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (62,069) from 2018.
While Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Mirage underperformed in comparison, their staggered releases on Ubisoft’s own storefront and the Epic Games Store, delaying their Steam launches by one to two years need to be considered. However, Mirage, which was lauded by critics for its return to the franchise’s roots, launched on Steam following the announcement of Shadows.
Despite its positive reception, Mirage managed only 7,870 peak players, debuting on Steam a year after its release, half of Valhalla’s numbers nearly two years post-launch (15,679), which was likely due to the exponential PR damage Ubisoft have sustained in trying to push a fictional Black samurai as historical fact upon consumers.
Looking at other recent single-player games, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which spent over seven years in development, was a massive commercial flop, peaking at 89,418 players. Estimates suggested the game needed to sell over three million copies just to break even, and that doesn’t even account for marketing, operational costs, or BioWare’s overall upkeep.
If Shadows is performing at only half that level, its future doesn’t look promising. Meanwhile, Ghost of Tsushima, a game praised for its historically accurate portrayal of feudal Japan, peaked at 77,154 players. Gamers have been waiting over a decade for an Assassin’s Creed game in Japan, and Ubisoft somehow managed to deliver a condescending, performative, virtue-signaling trainwreck instead.
For the first time ever, Assassin’s Creed lets players step into the boots of a real historical figure. The catch? Ubisoft picked Yasuke, a Black man whose brief presence in early 1600s Japan is barely a historical footnote. Instead of focusing on a well-documented samurai from the era or maintaining the status quo with a fictional protagonist rooted in an authentic setting, Ubisoft seemed more concerned with ticking ESG diversity checkboxes.
Yasuke, who was believed to have been a retainer or likely a servant to Oda Nobunaga, has been reinvented as a full-fledged samurai, despite zero evidence that he ever held such a rank.
You can trace this whole Yasuke-as-a-samurai fantasy back to Jewish-English author Thomas Lockley, who wrote two books on the topic, rewrote Wikipedia entries to match his claims, and even cited his own unpublished papers as “evidence.”
And now, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is ground zero for the culture war. Either you’ve got a working brain and see Ubisoft’s “historical accuracy” as a farce after they turned feudal Japan into some DEI wet dream, or you’re fully indoctrinated into the idea that White people and Asians are irredeemable racists who need to have their history rewritten.
No middle ground here, either you see the propaganda for what it is, or you’ve swallowed it whole.
Ubisoft has been hit with controversy after controversy over Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a game that was pretty much doomed from the start due to its heavy-handed agenda. Some of the smaller missteps, like trying to pass off a One Piece replica sword as Yasuke’s katana at Japan Expo or getting caught using plagiarized historical artifacts in AI-generated concept art are bad enough, but the bigger issues are even worse.
One major outrage came from Ubisoft’s official merchandise, which included a PureArts figure featuring a damaged, “one-legged” torii gate. In Japan, this is considered deeply disrespectful, as the only widely recognized example of such a torii stands as a grim reminder of the Nagasaki atomic bombings, having been partially destroyed in the explosion.
The Canadian activists who helped shove Assassin’s Creed Shadows into existence knew exactly what the hell they were doing. Ubisoft’s been flailing around, trying to convince everyone that the game is “authentic,” but players saw through their bullshit immediately.
To tick off all the DEI checkboxes, they made sure both Yasuke and his female co-protagonist could have two same-sex romances, one of them with a “non-binary” character. Because historical accuracy takes a backseat to agenda-pushing.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is marred by significant historical revisionism and intellectual property violations. A day-one patch was released to address some of the more glaring cultural insensitivity, such as the ability for unarmed civilians to bleed when attacked, as you could quite literally decapitate multiple civilians as Yasuke, a feature that contradicts the franchise’s established rule against senseless civilian harm to avoid desynchronization.
Additionally, the ability to damage and desecrate Shinto shrines was thankfully removed. However, the damage had already been done, with Japanese politicians openly expressing their disapproval of the game and its sacrilegious content.
Some of the shrines and temples in Assassin’s Creed Shadows are run by local families, but Ubisoft never consulted them before including them in the game. These families found out in the worst possible way, by watching a Black man cosplaying as a samurai attack their sacred sites.
Even worse, Ubisoft’s supposed “cultural authenticity” is called into question with their portrayal of Yasuke being able to romance Oichi, the sister of Oda Nobunaga, who is a direct ancestor of Japan’s Imperial family. The game also allows players to loot holy graves for armor, including the tomb of Emperor Nintoku, known as Hijiri-no-mikado (Saint Emperor), one of Japan’s most sacred burial sites.
Let’s be clear: Ubisoft made a game where a Black foreigner runs around Japan, destroying sacred shrines and stealing from holy sites, with a ridiculous premise that says he’s the ancestor of the royal family. And they’re somehow passing it off as “authentic” and “respectful.”
There’s no middle ground here, you either think this game is racist bullshit, or you’re one of the idiots defending Ubisoft by using weak excuses like “it’s just a game” or “you control the buttons you press,” completely ignoring the fact that the developers are the ones deciding what’s in the game.
The game has over two hours of credits, covering everything from licensing to packaging and distribution. It was also outsourced to hundreds of Indians, and let me tell you, the list of names is a mile long. Ubisoft themselves even admitted that half the people who worked on the project likely taking three to five years to complete had never worked on a video game before.
And, surprise, surprise, it shows.
Ubisoft delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows twice. Originally set to release in November last year, it was pushed back to February. This new release window put it up against Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds, both of which are currently beating Assassin’s Creed Shadows in terms of concurrent players on Steam, with much stronger player retention a month after release.
The two delays granted Ubisoft additional time to “polish” Assassin’s Creed Shadows, addressing numerous bugs and glitches that were evident in preview builds and early access footage. However, this extended development period resulted in increased costs, with the company spending over twenty million dollars more in wages for several additional months of work.
Given the game’s disappointing player figures, it is highly unlikely that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will recoup its budget, let alone turn a profit.
The game was already drowning in controversy, so there was no real need for Ubisoft to spend millions marketing it. But that didn’t stop them from paying off people like Hasan Piker, a trust fund baby who pretends to be a Communist and says America “deserved 9/11.”
And don’t forget, this guy also visited a brothel in Germany that got raided for sex trafficking and child related offenses months later. Ubisoft’s strategy here just shows how desperate they are to cater to whatever audience will lower their standards enough to buy into their crap.
In what appears to be a strategic attempt to generate positive publicity for their release, Ubisoft has claimed that Assassin’s Creed Shadows has reached one million players across all platforms. This announcement is being widely celebrated by access media outlets.
However, this figure, which focuses on player numbers rather than actual sales, applies to all platforms, including consoles, but conveniently omits the fact that, similar to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which also achieved higher player counts on PC, Shadows was released as part of a live service program.
Now that everything’s digital, video games aren’t just $60 or $70 products anymore, they’re a damn service that pitch themselves to consumers as way better and cheaper options for gamers. Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass is one, and EA and Ubisoft are all in with their live service subscriptions, letting you play the latest stuff without shelling out full price.
Want Assassin’s Creed Shadows? You can grab it on Ubisoft+ Premium for €18 a month (around $19.48). Way cheaper than the $70 you’d pay otherwise
Unlike Skull and Bones, Assassin’s Creed Shadows did not offer a free trial, and there are no publicly available figures detailing the number of subscribers to Ubisoft’s live service package. However, in a January 2024 interview, Ubisoft’s Director of Subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, stated that “millions of players” had joined the service since its launch in 2019. He also described 2023 as Ubisoft+’s “biggest year ever” for subscriber growth, surpassing company projections.
Despite these claims, Ubisoft has not disclosed precise subscriber counts. What we can estimate however is that over a million users have subscribed to the €18-per-month service, which grants access to Ubisoft’s extensive catalog, including recent releases such as Star Wars Outlaws, which underperformed, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which appears to be an even greater failure.
Failing companies have a new way to fool both shareholders and consumers, hiding poor sales by hyping up “player engagement” while avoiding hard numbers as their games are now offered on live services and no longer necessitate direct purchases. Ubisoft is doing exactly this with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, trying to pass off a struggling title as a success while the company itself continues laying off employees and cutting costs.
It’s highly unlikely that Shadows has sold even a million copies. Instead, its player count is being artificially inflated by Ubisoft+, a subscription service with millions of users, most of whom probably aren’t even playing the game. Ubisoft pulled a similar stunt with Skull and Bones, the so-called “AAAA” game that spent nearly a decade in development hell, only to launch with less quality of life fixtures than Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
When it released, Ubisoft boasted about “record player engagement” instead of sales, while offering an eight-hour free trial to boost such figures, ultimately the game flopped on release and eventually came to Steam months later with a 60% discount.
Meanwhile, game journalists are working overtime to defend their ideological buddies, hyping up Shadows for hitting a million “players” a day after launch. But let’s not forget, this was once a franchise that has sold over 200 million copies to date. It didn’t need these live service marketing tricks to “prove” itself. Now? It’s yet another casualty of the industry’s obsession with “global ethical standards,” forcing diversity quotas at the expense of historical authenticity and creative freedom.
Ubisoft wasn’t in great shape before Shadows launched. They were bleeding money, investors wanted them to go private, and Tencent was lurking in the shadows (no pun intended) waiting to pounce. They’ve already started shutting down projects like XDefiant and cutting jobs everywhere.
One million “players” sounds great until you realize that’s likely because a bunch of people are paying $20 a month instead of actually buying the game for $70. The Steam peak? A measly 47,000 players. Even if you double that for a global PC count, you’re still under 100,000. And if PC makes up about half of total sales, that would mean around 200,000 copies sold. Yet Ubisoft really wants us to believe they’ve hit a million.
Ubisoft has severely tarnished what little reputation it had left with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a game that seems more like a deliberate provocation than a genuine tribute to Japanese history. The decision to depict Yasuke as a samurai warrior, despite there being no evidence to support such a portrayal (apart from one testimony from a member of the communist party) is a forced diversity push rather than an authentic historical choice.
And because Ubisoft just can’t help themselves, they didn’t stop at turning Yasuke into a completely fabricated samurai, they had to slap on all the diversity tropes imaginable. Two male romance options? Sure. A disgusting little nod that he might somehow be connected to the Japanese royal family? Why the fuck not? They’re already rewriting history, so might as well go full throttle with the fanfiction.
Ubisoft didn’t even pretend to give a shit about cultural authenticity or historical accuracy in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Instead, they shoved in modern identity politics, and it shows. The presence of cherry blossoms alongside watermelons, despite the latter not being introduced to Japan until much later is just one example, as is the depiction of a one-legged torii gate in official merchandise.
This also includes a themed boba tea promotion for the game, despite bubble tea being a modern invention originating from Taiwan.
The developers, largely composed of Canadian activists, appear to have neglected thorough research or fact-checking, a failure further emphasized by the now-removed ability to desecrate shrines. Rather than delivering an immersive historical experience, Shadows instead presents a distorted, racially charged narrative, a DEI-driven disaster.
Ubisoft has admitted they’re out of touch with gamers while also proclaiming that their bloated AAA projects apparently need to sell 10 million copies just to break even, which is about as genuine as their claim that Assassin’s Creed Shadows has “one million players.”
The fact that Ubisoft is already scrambling to spin the narrative by focusing on player numbers instead of sales is pretty telling, had they opted to fixate upon an authentic experience with a Japanese protagonist set during a time period where Japan was not unified, this game would’ve been a guaranteed win, it would’ve sold by the millions but thanks to Ubisoft’s obsession with diversity quotas and racial pandering, it’s a flop.
Just like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which leaned on “player engagement” instead of actual sales, while journalists still called it a major success for topping charts and outperforming past titles on Steam, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is getting the same treatment. With its clear disrespect for Japanese history and culture, it’s no wonder Shadows has been so widely disliked. Honestly, Ubisoft has only itself to blame.
