Ubisoft Has Everything Riding On ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’

It is launch week for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the long-anticipated, but often controversial new entry in the series, taking it, finally, to a place that fans have been requesting for a decade, samurai-era Japan.

It’s easily the biggest release of the last several years from Ubisoft, really since Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in 2020. That game was a big success for the franchise and the company, but it feels like Shadows will have to be that level of a hit as well, if not more so, to help keep the beleaguered Ubisoft afloat in its currenet form.

Since 2020, Ubisoft stock has fallen 77%, with a 30% drop in the last year alone. As recently as December 2024, shareholders of the company were debating how to structure a buyout of the company without reducing the founding family’s control of it. As of a few days ago, there’s an idea about a third party company taking a stake in Ubisoft that would allow it to own its IPs instead of the publisher itself. At present, Ubisoft’s market cap is just $1.75 billion, which despite its vast slate of IPs, is half of what Sony paid for Bungie in 2022, which at the time made only a single game, Destiny 2.

That list of IPs is why Assassin’s Creed Shadows has to be a big hit. It’s the company’s biggest franchise, and looking ahead to its upcoming slate, it’s hard to imagine much else getting close to it. Assassin’s Creed and The Division mobile games are supposed to be coming. Far Cry 7 will get here eventually, but that’s no AC. The Division 3 has been announced with no set date or even year. Ubisoft swears Beyond Good and Evil 2, last seen in a 2018 trailer seven years ago, still exists.

The problem is that even if Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a hit, the company is clearly in a different place than it was in 2020 when Valhalla ended up earning $1 billion in revenue. Again, Ubisoft is now worth 77% less since then, and that $1 billion is almost two thirds of the entire market cap of the company. It’s a new era.

I would frankly be surprised if Shadows performs as well as Valhalla. Also over the last five years, so many live, multiplayer games have captured the attention of players and it can be hard to extract them for anything short of a generational single player game. And recently, even Ubisoft games that should have been promising like Star Wars Outlaws have underperformed. I’m not sure most people even remember Ubisoft released an Avatar game just over a year ago in December 2023.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows has turned into a culture war focal point laying into mainly its choice to have Yasuke, a black samurai, as one of its two leads. That, plus other controversies have eclipsed some of the online marketing to this point. That said, after a delay into 2025, what has been shown of the game feels promising and polished. Review scores will go out soon ahead of its release on Thursday, but historically, Ubisoft does not produce many GOTY contenders, and almost all its big series score somewhere between a 75 and 85 Metascore, with some outliers. With Shadows, who knows, maybe it’s a perfect rendition of the formula, maybe not. Even still, what’s the power of the brand five years later? Ubisoft had better hope it’s still a draw.

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