Assassin’s Creed Shadows is now out on Steam, Windows, and console platforms. Ubisoft has been making a big push to promote the game leading up to March 20th and, now that the day has arrived, things are not going too well on Steam. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows has opened to disappointing concurrent player count numbers on Steam and is far worse than BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
So far, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was able to reach 41,412 concurrent players on Steam at around 12:30 pm EST. However, peak time in the United States tends to be around 6:00 pm EST and, unfortunately for Ubisoft, the numbers have gone slightly down instead of up. By 6:00 pm EST, the player count dropped by 5% down to 39,149 players.
To put this in perspective, on opening day for BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the game managed to peak at 70,414 at 6:00 pm EST. Both games were released on a Thursday and quickly became the #1 best-selling game on Steam. But only one of these games had a major handicap. Veilguard was released on October 31st which is Halloween. Meaning that younger gamers would be out trick or treating and partying. For Assassin’s Creed Shadows, there is no such handicap to explain the very low Steam player count and 41% lower than Veilguard.
In addition, while Assassin’s Creed Shadows was able to hit rank 29 of the Top 100 games being played on Steam, Dragon Age: The Veilguard managed to hit rank #9 on its launch day. As of the posting of this article, Rank 29 is the highest AC Shadows has reached, beating out Destiny 2 and The Sims 4, but failing to surpass Terraria, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and Elden Ring.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ reception on Steam is dismal and foreboding for Ubisoft, which has seen every game in 2024 flop. While nowhere near as bad as Star Wars Outlaws, which couldn’t even reach 2,500 concurrent players on Steam during its launch weekend, this is still an early indication that AC Shadows sales figures are going to come in well below whatever number Ubisoft has set for it.
Speculation about whether or not Assassin’s Creed Shadows would be a success or flop leaned more towards it being another failure for Ubisoft. But not below even Veilguard’s benchmark which turned into a major flop for BioWare. And while the PC platform isn’t where the majority of sales will come from, it still attributes for a significant portion.
However, it could be that things turn around for AC shadows during its launch weekend in which Veilguard could only peak at 89, 418 players on Steam. What is even worse for Ubisoft is that it announced Assassin’s Creed Shadows had quickly reached 1 million players across all platforms. Players, not copies sold. So who knows how many copies of AC Shadows Ubisoft has been given away through reviews, giveaways, subscription services, bundle promotions, etc.
In the meantime, sites such as GamesRadar, are trying to spin a narrative with the main talking point comparing AC Shadows to previous Assassin’s Creed games. A moot talking point when the fact is that Shadows is the first Assassin’s Creed game to be released day 1 on Steam, which these sites do not bring up. We should point out that Valhalla was released on Steam almost two years after it launched on consoles.
So do you think Assassin’s Creed Shadows will even reach 100,000 concurrent players on Steam during its launch weekend?
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[…] [ March 21, 2025 ] Launch Day for Assassin’s Creed Shadows Sees Dismal Player Count on Steam, … […]