A Month Later Assassin’s Creed Shadows Sees Steep Player Drop and Indications of Being Ubisoft’s 2025 Failure

With Ubisoft quick to declare that Assassin’s Creed Shadows hit 3 million players, and Circana analysts stating that it was the “best-selling video game in the US for each of its first 3 weeks in market,” would make it seem that the game has been a success for the developer. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ first month has shown a steep decline in concurrent players on Steam, with other indications that the action-adventure game set in Japan is Ubisoft’s latest failure.

Released March 20th, Assassin’s Creed Shadows peaked its opening weekend on Steam with 64,825 players. That number has declined 74.7% to 16,356 exactly one month after release. To put this into perspective, BioWare’s own action-adventure title Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a higher concurrent Steam player count during its launch weekend with 89,418 only to see a 77% drop one month later down to 19,715 players – outperforming Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

While Ubisoft was quick to post player numbers for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, it appears that the player count peaked at 3 million within the game’s first week. Since then, the developer has been silent on future player count numbers given further credence to the assumption that the number is not as impressive-sounding as it should be due to Ubisoft’s own subscription service that allows consumers to play its newest title for the price of $17.99 a month. In other words, player count doesn’t equate to copies sold.

And Ubisoft has yet to announce how many copies Shadows has sold so far.

Yet, the company was quick to reveal more innocuous figures such as Assassin’s Creed Shadows having the “2nd highest Day 1 sales revenue in Assassin’s Creed franchise history.” Meanwhile, analysts pointed out that Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ dollar sales put it in second place for 2025 behind Monster Hunter: Wilds. A PR spin that still didn’t disclose any hard figures and ignored the fact that Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ $70 price tag, along with its expensive collector’s editions, would immediately push it past other better-selling titles.

For example, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sold 2 million copies within two weeks of its February 7th release. 2 million copies at $50 would be $100 million in potential dollar sales. For Assassin’s Creed Shadows to beat the dollar sales, it would only have to sell 1.5 million copies at $70 to easily surpass KC:D2 with a potential $105 million in total dollar sales. In Japan, Assassin’s Creed Shadows sold 17,701 copies within its first three days. Not a great number for a country that the game is set in and especially not good when western-developed Ghost of Tsushima averaged around 30,000 copies sold a day when it launched.

So what is being said here is that the sales figures for copies of Assassin’s Creed Shadows is nowhere near what Ubisoft was expecting and cannot compete against games released by smaller studios in 2025 on that specific metric. Otherwise, Ubisoft would have been more than willing to disclose those sales figures just as eagerly as the player numbers.

Player retention also seems to be an issue for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. During the game’s first month, Steam Achievements shows an increase in players finishing the Prologue (87.9% to 89.1%), and A New League Rises (39.2% to 56.5%), while the amount of players who reached the game’s Epilogue increased at a very slow rate from 1.0% to 7.9%. For Dragon Age: The Veilguard, players reaching the final part of the game at the end of its first month was at 25.3%. 

Achievements on XBOX shows a similar, yet more positive, trend with 96% of players completing the Prologue, 63% finishing Act 1 A New League Rises, and only 11% completing the Epilogue.

This could be an indication of poor player retention on Steam that could coincide with the higher level of Steam Refund Requests that were seen during the first few days of AC Shadows’ release (434,553 requests on release day). In addition, it could also mean that many Steam and XBOX players decided to cancel their Ubisoft Plus subscription, after the first month, rather than continue playing the game to its end for a second month.

While journalists and analysts will dismiss Steam player numbers and rankings, ignore similar trends and indicators, the evidence is rather straightforward. Especially when using Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a comparison study. Both Veilguard and Shadows are triple-A titles developed by big developers with bloated budgets and problematic development. BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s budget bloated due to a long, troubled development time period while Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows may have been in development for a shorter time period but had a far larger pool of developers working on it.

Both games are action-adventure titles that can take around 40 hours to complete, at minimum, yet Veilguard had a higher completion rate compared to Shadows at the one-month mark. To reiterate, Shadows saw a player drop of 74.7% on Steam with a 7.9% completion rate after being out for a month. Which means player retention and replayablity is not at a sufficient level to keep driving sales to a significant degree. Ignoring its insane numbers on launch, Baldur’s Gate 3, a RPG, saw a 33.1% drop in player numbers during its first month. 

It is also notable that, while Veilguard has put up better numbers on Steam than Assassin’s Creed Shadows, EA finally admitted that Dragon Age: The Veilguard did not meet the company’s expectations by 50%. One should also point out that Veilguard was $60 on PC and Shadows is $70 (Veilguard’s console version was $70).

Given these factors, there is a high probability that Assassin’s Creed Shadows has failed to meet Ubisoft’s expectations when it comes to copies sold. One can only look at the developer’s recent stock price which continues to decline, stock price was $13.09 on March 20th and is now at $9.32 a month later, and its latest deal with “Chinese Military Company” Tencent that revolves around the creation of a new subsidiary to protect what it considers the company’s most lucrative IPs, as further proof that Shadows is not able to stem the hemorrhaging of money, especially after a disastrous 2024.

It appears Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the latest failure for Ubisoft and the first Ubisoft failure in 2025. The question now is, how short did it fall of Ubisoft’s expectations? After all, why would the developer tell its employees to not compare Shadows with other Assassin’s Creed Games?

Something is up at Ubisoft.

Do you think AC Shadows is a failure? Let us know in the comments below and vote in the poll!

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been out for a month, do you think it is a success of failure for Ubisoft?#AssassinsCreedShadows #AssassinsCreed #ACShadows #PCGaming #XBOX #PlayStation #Gaming

— Sean D Knight (@SeanDKnight) April 21, 2025

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