At the start, Assassin’s Creed Shadows outsold its predecessors — Origins and Odyssey by the number of players.
The game about feudal Japan has already been played by more than 3 million players, although the figures are not as high as Valhalla. In addition, it has record-breaking figures on Twitch — in the first week, it gained more than 10.9 million hours of viewing. Shadows was second only to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds among the releases of 2025. At its peak, the game was watched by 250,777 viewers, and the maximum number of streamers who watched it reached 5,383.
One of the main reasons for the popularity was Twitch Drops — Ubisoft gave away «cosmetics» for characters if viewers watched the broadcasts for a certain time. Thus, thousands of viewers could be tempted by free gifts. At the start of the early access, the game was ranked 4th in terms of time spent watching on Twitch, and after the official release, it dropped to 6th place. Streamers from the US, Germany, and France attracted the most viewers.
Also on Steam, Assassin’s Creed Shadows became the most popular game in the series by the number of simultaneous players, with a peak of 64,825. However, it is still inferior to other major RPGs, including Dragon Age: The Veilguard (89,418 simultaneous players)
The main question remains: people play, but do they buy? Ubisoft is clearly counting on high sales, as they will determine the future of not only the series, but also the company itself. However, until Ubisoft’s financial report, we will only have to guess whether Shadows has met expectations. So far, the company has not disclosed specific sales figures. It is only known that Shadows showed the second-best result in terms of revenues on the first day among all parts of the Assassin’s Creed series, except for Valhalla.
At the same time, Ubisoft is in a difficult situation. The company has been facing release delays for several years, unsuccessful projects and financial problems. Last year sales of Star Wars Outlaws failed and even earlier, Ubisoft closed studios and fired developers. All of this makes the release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows particularly important for the company. And now the future of the series will depend on the Chinese Tencent, which bought a share of the new studio Ubisoft.
Source: IGN
