It's been a rough year for Assassin's Creed Shadows, which has been the target of outrage from some perpetually-outraged corners of gaming fandom; it's also suffered a few self-inflicted wounds, and of course an ugly delay that pushed it into 2025, and then a second, smaller postponement that bumped it to its current release date of March 20. But with the big day now just five weeks away, Ubisoft says things are looking good—by one metric, at least.
"Positive previews that highlight the immersive world, stunning graphics and variety of gameplay brought by the dual-protagonist approach," Ubisoft wrote in its Q3 2024-25 financial report. "Pre-orders are tracking solidly, in line with those of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the second most successful entry of the franchise."
Preorders don't tell the whole story, not by a long shot, especially when they've only been open for a few weeks. But there's not much else to go on in the pre-release period, so you go with what you've got—and as far as it goes, Ubisoft CEO Frederick Duguet said the numbers are encouraging.
"Odyssey's been the second-biggest performer in the franchise history, very close to Valhalla in terms of units sold on a comparable time basis," Duguet said during today's investors call. "At the time when we launched Odyssey, it set a new benchmark for the franchise, it was a very successful first week. So that's what we can say at this stage. When we look back, Odyssey has been accumulating 40 million players to date, so it's been really a great success. So what we see as a preorder benchmark is encouraging."
Duguet acknowledged that the bulk of the preorder period still lies ahead, and that leaves a lot of time for things to either catch fire or fizzle out. But, he said, "What we can see to date, it's really positive."
The other upside for Assassin's Creed Shadows is that it looked very good in pre-release previews. The delay sucked, sure, but after spending six hours with it in January, PC Gamer's Morgan Park thinks it'll be "worth the wait," writing that even though Ubisoft has a lot riding on it (after years of struggles, this is as make-or-break as it gets), Shadows "showed a level of confidence I haven't seen from the publisher in years. Six hours is a drop in the bucket of what's likely a 40-60 hour game, but I'm feeling a lot better two months ahead of Shadows than I did two months ahead of Star Wars Outlaws."
