Assassin’s Creed Shadowsishaving a really strong launch, defying the expectations of haters who assumed that the series would go broke because it went woke (read:stars a Black samurai). That hasn’t been the case, andthe game has already notched more than two million players since it launched last week. Time will tell if it can clinch enough success to reverseUbisoft’s downward slide, but the company seems happy with its performance — even if it isn’t matching the highs of 2020’sValhalla.
“Valhalla launched under extraordinary conditions — in the middle of a global pandemic, with widespread lockdowns and brand-new console hardware," readsinternal Ubisoft communication obtained by IGN. “It was a perfect storm we may never see again. That’s why it’s more meaningful to compare Shadows to entries like Origins, Odyssey, and Mirage — games released in more typical cycles. And in that frame, Shadows is already setting a new bar as illustrated above.”
Gaming’s Pandemic Boost
If you lived through 2020, you know that it was an anomaly for the world as a whole. It was anomalously bad for other entertainment industries; film and the theater took major financial hits for obvious, social distancing reasons. But the experience of playing video games was unhampered by such things. If anything, It was easier than ever to hop online for someApexwith friends or dump a hundred hours into a pretty good open-world game. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was that pretty good open-world game.
The increased interest in gaming was great for the industry, but it’s best not to attempt to learn wide-ranging lessons from 2020’s overperformance.I’ve written about it before, but the year painted an extremely optimistic picture for the future of live-service games. Online multiplayer games likeAnimal Crossing: New Horizons,Among Us,Fall Guys, andPhasmophobiaall blew up that year thanks to a pandemic and lockdowns that was keeping most people inside. That streak continued into 2021 asValheimfound a huge audience pre-vaccine. But the years since have taught us that there isn’t an endless appetite for live service games. There was just an endless appetite, amid lockdowns, for anything to do to kill the time.
If that time-killing activity helped you connect with the friends you couldn’t see, even better. But it wasn’t just multiplayer games.Doom Eternal generated $450 million in revenue within a year of its launch.Final Fantasy 7 Remakesold 5 million copies by August of 2020.Ghost of Tsushimawasthe PS4’s fastest selling original game. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which straddles the line between single-player and multiplayer, wasthe series’ biggest launch ever, eventually accounting for almost half of the series’ lifetime sales. It was also thesecond best-selling Switch game. And, as noted,Valhalla had generated over a billion dollars in revenue by 2022.
2020 Was An “Artificial High”
In those unprecedented times, people were gaming in unprecedented numbers. That success is unreplicable, and it’s smart of Ubisoft to ignore Valhalla’s success when considering Shadows’ fortunes.
It also seems fairly common. When I chatted with Jackbox CEO Mike Bilder at theGame Developers Conferencelast week, he said something similar about the online party game series’ explosive COVID-era success, and subsequent leveling out. “The same way that gaming declined and the industry declined, we declined and came down from that real high. I would argue it’s an artificial high, as well,” he said. “But in the trajectory of the company, we’re still in a growth mode if you normalize for that.”
Ubisoft is taking the same approach with Shadows. 2020’s influx of players was great for developers in that particular moment. But, in the long-term, it would be a mistake to see that high-water mark as anything other than a historical footnote.
