Assassins's Creed: Shadows has one of the best launches on Steam in the series' history.
Literally a minute after the publication of this news, Ubisoft announced that on day day, a million players played Assassin’s Creed: Shadows on all platforms.
Releasing yesterday, Assassin's Creed: Shadows can boast one of the strongest launches in the series' history on Steam. According to SteamDB, Ubisoft's latest game reached a peak number of 41,412 concurrent users (via SteamDB), which puts it in third place in the series' history (although it's uncertain whether it might not jump to the second spot).
The new Assassin's Creed almost immediately left behind AC: Valhalla and AC: Mirage. It's important to note that these releases were not available on Steam at launch (initially, they were only available on PC through the Ubisoft Store and Epic Games Store) - thus, the competition wasn't completely fair. The real challenge, however, was AC: Origins and AC: Odyssey. For comparison:
AC: Shadows is one step away from surpassing Origins, and considering that the number of active players may still increase in the coming days (especially over the weekend), it is even possible to challenge Odyssey—the current record holder of the series on Steam. The highest-rated game about hooded assassins, the iconic Assassin's Creed 2, managed to attract only 3,617 players at its "peak" after its release on Steam. It's worth noting that the older "Assassins" games hit PC some time after their console premiere, which could have influenced players' platform choice to some extent.
Right now, the title is also receiving "very positive" reviews on Steam - 80% of the opinions are positive (out of over 2200 all submitted). Unlike many previous installments, AC: Shadows didn't suffer from a plague of bugs at launch, which players liked very much. However, criticism is directed at the requirement to use Ubisoft Connect and microtransactions.
Will Assassin’s Creed: Shadows finally break Odyssey's record? Time will tell - after all, the bar is set quite high. Nonetheless, it's clear that the game, despite the controversy, is attracting a lot of interest.
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Author: Michal Harat
He graduated in Polish philology with a specialization in journalism at the University of Gdańsk. He fell in love with games at the age of 4, when his older cousin turned on his dusty Pegasus. He completed his first title, Wolfenstein 3D, in the basement of his friend from kindergarten (his father kept an outdated PC there). Today, he plays almost exclusively on consoles, mainly on Switch and PlayStation, but he also has a lot of retro equipment on which he makes up for what he missed as a child. He says about every soulsborne production that "it's a good game, maybe the best." In his free time, he reads books that no one is interested in and goes to the gym. He is a fan of the Berserk manga and films from the A24 production company.