Assassin’s Creed Shadows recently surpassed 2 million players for its launch weekend, Ubisoft reported, which is an extremely strong launch.
But Ubisoft hasn’t been touting Shadows as the biggest launch in the company’s history, and according to a report from VGC, that’s because it’s only the second biggest launch in Ubisoft history.
VGC reports that while the launch of Shadows has been very strong, it still falls short of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which remains at the top spot for Day 1 launch revenue.
Shadows is no slouch, though, as VGC points out that Shadows enjoyed the best launch day numbers for a Ubisoft game on the PlayStation Store, and that the game had more eyes on it than any previous Ubisoft title on Twitch, with 11 million hours watched.
It’s difficult to say exactly why Shadows didn’t eclipse the day-1 sales of Valhalla, but there are a few factors that can be pointed to, which definitely helped Valhalla hit the heights it did.
Chief among them is the fact that Valhalla launched 7 months into 2020’s global lockdown, when the entire games industry was experiencing a big boom. That comes second to the fact that Valhalla also launched in November, which is already a popular time of year for game sales.
Shadows hit the numbers it did in March, outside of a global pandemic forcing everyone to stay home. We can’t know if Valhalla would’ve been less successful if it were to have launched in the conditions Shadows did, but we do know that even with Shadows falling short of Valhalla, it’s still a resounding success.
Source – [VGC]