What Happens If Assassin’s Creed Shadows Fails?

Assassin’s Creed may be the series that most epitomises modern gaming franchises’ profitability, as the most fondly remembered and iconic version may not necessarily be the best-selling. Other game series have experienced this phenomenon, but few encapsulate this disconnect as well as Assassin’s Creed II, which created many iconic elements and characters. However, the best-selling entry of the series is actually Assassin's Creed III, an ironic feat as it is sandwiched between the two most widely praised mainline titles, Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Furthermore, in the live service era, most copies sold does not equal most profitable — Assassin’s Creed Valhalla holds that title thanks in no small part to the game’s microtransactions. To be clear, microtransactions are not an entirely accurate barometer of success, as the Valhalla expansion turned full-release Assassin’s Creed Mirage didn’t quite seem to be the success that Ubisoft may have expected. However, with a smaller budget and claims of being Ubisoft’s best-selling current-gen product at the time of release, Mirage showed that a disappointment doesn’t necessarily mean a financial loss. Mirage also demonstrated that despite some hurdles, the franchise still has a lot of strength left in it. It’s this very strength that Ubisoft is relying on to hype up the series’ newest entry, Assassin's Creed Shadows. But all good things must come to an end, and since the game has already been tied to several controversies alongside a failing track record of Ubisoft titles, could it be doomed to fail, and if so, what will happen to Ubisoft?

Before we begin with the juicy bits, let’s review a quick history of the franchise. Released in 2007, Assassin’s Creed tells the tale of an assassin named Altair during the Third Crusade. Rather than being a straightforward medieval action title, though, the game’s story actually takes place in the present day, where Altair’s descendent Desmond Miles watches the memories of his ancestor through a machine called “The Animus”. The game received positive reviews at release, with the storytelling method and the mechanic of hiding in plain sight serving as the biggest differentiators from other stealth titles at the time. 

However, the series really made its mark on the gaming community with Assassin’s Creed II. Still following the overarching narrative of Desmond Miles and the Animus, the game’s primary story takes place around 300 years after the Third Crusade, bringing players into the Italian Renaissance. It is also during this time that players were introduced to fan-favourite protagonist Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and the design of the first game’s hidden blade was altered into the iconic device that the series is known for. Sales would continue to rise with the next two releases (Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Revelations), until the franchise hit a sales peak with 2012’s Assassin’s Creed III, which sold over 12 million copies. Even though no other entry has been able to match that number, the series is still going strong, with major shake-ups and gameplay changes contributing it to being the best-selling franchise in Ubisoft’s history.

So if it’s such a profitable IP, shouldn’t Shadows be a surefire hit for the company? The answer is maybe, but not a guarantee. As mentioned earlier, the last Assassin’s Creed game, while not a failure, may have performed below expectations, as Ubisoft bragged about the revenue generated from Valhalla but not Mirage. Coupled with the low advertising budget and lack of hype after its reveal, Mirage showed that the licence still has strength, but it might be weakening.

This is where Shadows comes in. In 2022, Ubisoft announced the game’s location would be one that fans have been clamouring for since Assassin’s Creed II: Sengoku-era Japan. Along with this hotly anticipated setting, the studio later revealed that the series was going to mark a shift in the design philosophy related to the IP. Shadows will incorporate the biggest change in gameplay from other Assassin’s Creed entries — the ability for players to switch between characters throughout the campaign. While players have had the option to choose between two protagonists in several recent Assassin’s Creed games, the choice was permanent and offered only narrative differences or, in the case of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, the two playable characters play very similarly. Shadows expands on this by featuring different styles of gameplay for each character, with the samurai Yasuke being more action-heavy and the shinobi Naoe inspired by the stealth gameplay of early Assassin’s Creed titles. This unique take on action versus stealth was what brought the game a lot of positive attention early on, but it also is an indirect cause of negative attention surrounding the game.

Yasuke is a black man. Unfortunately, the mere existence of a black protagonist has lead to unwarranted negative attention in the current political climate, and the fact that Yasuke is a black man in feudal Japan was enough to lead to a very loud outcry online. Even though this version of Yasuke is based on the real-life person of the same name, who has been depicted many times in Japanese media, rage merchants of a certain persuassion have argued that Ubisoft choosing one of the few black men in feudal Japan to star in its game is an example of supposed DEI agenda of Western game design. Right-wing internet commentators have also claimed that Yasuke was not a samurai, making the game’s appeals to historical accuracy disingenuous. The irony is that in the video in the linked Reddit post above, Japanese historian Yasatsune Owada, a professor at Shizuoka Eiwa Gakuin University, states that Yasuke’s status as a samurai is debated, but there are no records that prove his status definitively. It's for this reason that some historians such as Nihon University’s Thomas Lockley told The Japan Times that no reputable Japanese historian would believe that he isn’t one, while others such as Arizona State University’s Robert Tuck believes that it is possible and maybe even likely, but also mentions there are less reliable sources to support this than Lockley may claim. Instead of this debate amongst scholars educating people about the ephemeral nature of certain historical facts in eras pre-heavy documentation, it has helped fuel an inevitability: one where a group of netizens have decided that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is “woke”, and will scrutinise the game far more harshly than they would if it starred a Japanese man. This is without acknowledging the fact that the game does in fact allow you to play as a Japanese woman, something which is seemingly not good enough for certain commentators.

It is always unfortunate when we see such toxicity in the gaming community, especially when it drowns out valid criticisms regarding the game’s development. On June 10, 2024, the leader of the Japanese historical re-enactment group known as “Sekigahara Teppo-tai” issued a statement that Ubisoft used a flag the group created as artwork without their permission. Ubisoft responded to this group with an apology, stating it would no longer use the flag for promotional images and agreeing to remove an image of the flag from the collector’s edition artbook, according to multiple reports. 

It’s a blow to history fans that could be forgiven as an accident, but this is not the only instance the game appears to have used things from Japan without permission. In February, game news site Automaton reported that officials at the Itate Hyozu Shrine in Himeji confirmed to Sankei News that the location was included in Assassin’s Creed Shadows without their permission. Furthermore, gameplay was leaked online which included the player character breaking pots and other objects within the sacred area. This sparked outrage, fueling Japanese beliefs that the game doesn’t respect their culture or the Shinto religion.

While the franchise has historically been unkind to religion (Assassin’s Creed II famously has you assassinate the pope), the treatment of Itate Hyozu Shrine raises concerns of cultural colonialism since Western media takes a more lax attitude towards religion while Japanese media doesn’t. It is understandable that some  Japanese people could feel Ubisoft is appropriating their culture, taking the things that Westerners like about Japan through an ethnocentric lens while disregarding other things. 

Regardless, such issues do not mean the game will fail, as other products (such as The Last of Us Part II) managed to become best-sellers despite both boycotts from the “anti-woke” crowd and low sales in Japan. It is very much a possibility that the game will be a success, and Ubisoft is probably hoping that's the case now more than ever, because the studio is in trouble.

To put it bluntly, 2024 was a very bad year for Ubisoft, but to properly tell this story, we need to travel back over a decade ago with the release of 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. After receiving critical and commercial praise for its unique naval combat, Ubisoft decided to greenlight a multiplayer expansion before pivoting said expansion into a fully-fledged game. The result was Skull and Bones, a product doomed for Davy Jones' locker. Officially announced in 2017, Kotaku reported that development for the title was long and messy, with no clear vision, and several internal reboots. To make matters worse, Ubisoft was in a precarious position as it was legally unable to cancel the title without losing a lot of money thanks to a funding stipulation from the Singapore government. It was for these reasons that Skull and Bones would struggle in its decade-long quest for release but, while many gamers were pessimistic, Yves Guillemot assured them of its quality by referring to it as a “quadruple-A game”. However, when it was released in February of 2024, Skull and Bones did not become the splash Guillemot claimed it to be and as a result, Ubisoft boasted about the player engagement but did not disclose any numbers related to net profits. The development of Skull and Bones was a tragedy that shows how Ubisoft is not the company that it once was, spending so much time and money on a doomed IP when it could have been used on the other, more iconic series instead.

Indeed, series like Far Cry and Watch Dogs have all seemed to disappear from the gaming consensus, while the Tom Clancy franchise is only holding on with Rainbow Six Siege (which unfortunately, appears to have a decreasing player base as of March 2024). It was for this reason that Ubisoft decided to do something about these ignored titles, releasing the free-to-play live service shooter XDefiant in May 2024, a game that saw the worlds of various Tom Clancy titles come together with Far Cry and Watch Dogs in multiplayer combat. 

XDefiant’s servers are scheduled to shut down a little over a year after its release.

Whether the low player base is thanks to generic gameplay that’s vastly different from many of the featured titles or diminishing brand power, XDefiant is seen as a failure for a company that needed a win. Fortunately, if its crossover event did not have the star power to create a success, maybe one of the most profitable franchises of all time would. 2024 may have seen the launch of two hyped titles, but Ubisoft’s most anticipated release was Star Wars Outlaws, a third-person action game that allowed fans to roam the Star Wars universe, taking on the seedy world that iconic scoundrels like Han Solo or Lando Calrissian made their names in.

Star Wars Outlaws was met with average reviews upon its release, and sales seemed to tell a story more worrisome than that. J.P. Morgan analysts originally had a sales projection for the title around 7.5 million units, but that number dropped down to 5.5 million after its release, as reported by Insider Gaming. The reality may be even worse than that, as Insider Gaming also reported that Outlaws only managed to sell around 1 million units as of September 2024. It's a very grave fact that is supported by a Ubisoft  earnings report from October 30 of that year stating the game “underperformed” with no further elaboration regarding sales or player count. The company’s stock price dropped to the lowest point in over a decade shortly after the game’s release, according to multiple reports.

While the studio’s stock has not dropped that low since then, a clear picture has been painted for some time. Ubisoft enjoyed large growth from 2015–2018 yet the company has been suffering a downfall almost as quickly since 2021. These financial woes lead Ubisoft to face the most depressing and defining constant in the games industry: layoffs. In January of 2025, Eurogamer reported that the company had announced layoffs in three different locations, as well as the closure of Ubisoft Leamington, a studio that predominantly assisted other Ubisoft-owned subsidiaries but was actually the original developer of Guitar Hero spinoff DJ Hero. 

So now that we have established the financial problems that Ubisoft is currently under, we must ask what the future holds for the game publisher. The most likely scenario is a buyout from Chinese multimedia conglomerate Tencent. Given Tencent’s goals of international expansion, it makes sense for it to desire a publisher with as much history and franchises as Ubisoft, in which it already has a significant stake in several global developers and publishers. While earlier reports from Reuters alleged disagreements between the two parties over long term plans for control, it is now being reported by Bloomberg that Ubisoft is searching for investors to help fund a brand new business venture that will handle the company’s most profitable IPs. It’s a move that is clearly being done in response to the company’s trouble, but what is the plan here aside from cutting the fat? The answer might be found in the one specific IP Bloomberg mentions will be included in the project, Assassin’s Creed. 

The fact that these calls are happening so close to the launch of Assassin’s Creed Shadows really shows how important the title is for the Guillemot family. The company is doing poorly, but if Shadows does well, the brothers can prove to investors that they still know how to make financially profitable games. Ubisoft may have seen some bad days, but with the CEO that made its last big hit handling a new and exciting company, surely there is no way that fate will be repeated. Investors (including Tencent) are encouraged to make their preliminary bids soon, but given that the article reports plans may change, it’s possible for Ubisoft to cancel or drastically alter those plans if the game ends up saving the company completely.

But if Assassin’s Creed Shadows fails, then the Guillemot brothers’ time may be over. The company has several releases scheduled for 2025, and while many of them are based on established IPs such as The Division and Might and Magic, there is a reason Ubisoft is putting so much time and resources into Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The truth of the matter is that there is a very real chance that Ubisoft closes down if it has another year like 2024. Sure, the Guillemots may be able to start a new company, but they may need to take Tencent’s bid to make it happen, a bid that is all but assured to want a majority of this new company. It’s for this reason that while many Ubisoft IPs could see new releases after being sold off or transferred, the closure would be the biggest casualty of the decade so far, and most likely would not be topped.

All that remains is the question: what will Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ sales be? The truth is that while some may hope for the game to crash and burn, it most likely will not reach the level of failure that plagued other Ubisoft products of 2024. The Assassin’s Creed franchise has shown itself repeatedly to be a profitable section of Ubisoft’s portfolio, meaning sales will probably be enough to give the company its most profitable quarter in quite some time. But will it be enough to save the Guillemot brothers’ jobs? Maybe, but at best it would only give them time, for if they want to save both the company and their position in it, they will need to do far more in an era that has not been kind to the industry.