Things aren’t exactly going great at Ubisoft these days, so they are keen to share whatever good news they can. To that, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the latest entry in the historically inspired stab-a-thon, has surpassed 5 million players.
Note the user of “players” in that sentence, as Ubisoft continues to keep quiet about actual sales. This is not uncommon in this day and age of subscription services, but it’s still slightly annoying that companies can’t just give us player counts and actual copies sold.
Shadows has apparently sold “in line with expectations”, which doesn’t seem like glowing praise. Then again, that was said in a Q1 earnings report, and they tend to keep things more professional.
We did also learn in the most recent earnings results from just a few days ago that Shadows had a development budget of at “over” $116 million”, which is rather vague. It’s hard to gauge budgets; on the one hand, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was around $200 million, while Alan Wake 2 was $70 million. Assassin’s Creed games benefit from having an established pipeline, tools, etc, which undoubtedly keeps costs down. But they are still massive games with a huge amount of people working on them.
In other words, it probably was over $116 million by quite a bit. The marketing budget is not usually included in the development budget, either, which must also be recouped.
Luckily, we do have some other data to work with. Analytics firm Alinea Analytics claims that Shadows has sold 2 million copies on PS5, and another 650k on Steam. It also notes 1.1 million players on Xbox, which the firm said is largely via Ubisoft+. Note, that is players and not copies sold.
However, this leaves us with about 1.25m players unaccounted for, since Ubisoft is saying 5 million players. This could be Ubisoft’s own storefront on PC, or perhaps PC Game Pass, which was not mentioned by Alinea or the Epic Game Store.
Alinea claims that “These numbers are decent, but Shadows has not generated much profit, with revenues at over $180 million.”
We can extrapolate a little from that. Accounting for PlayStation taking its 30% cut and then for Steam’s tiered cuts, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows would have to sell around 3.6million copies to achieve $180 million in revenue. That doesn’t account for special editions, or periods in which the game was discounted.
Alinea says it sold about 2.75 million on PS5 and PC, which means another 900k copies need to be sold via Ubisoft’s store and the Epic Game Store as well in order to reach my estimate. Keep in mind, copies sold via Ubisoft’s own store allow Ubisoft to keep ALL of the value from the sale.
Ultimately, this is all speculation. Alinea has access to far more data than I do, but of course, their calculations use proprietary methods that are not disclosed. Or to put it simply: take it with a pinch of salt. Same with my quick napkin mathmatics.
It also means we cannot answer the question of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’ profitability with much certainty. The game has charted well, but I can’t shake the feeling it hasn’t performed as well as Ubisoft had hoped. That’s important in a time when Ubisoft’s stock prices are still floundering, and they are going through the process of creating a subsidiary company.
In other Ubisoft news, they let slip that a new first-person Ghost Recon game is in the works. And it’s probably a live-service multiplayer game.