On March 20, the French video game company Ubisoft released the highly anticipated action RPG Assassin's Creed Shadows. The publisher was quick to announce on its X site that more than 1 million players have played the game so far. The RPG is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
However, if you look at Steam numbers, the results are a bit more modest. According to SteamDB, the game peaked at 41,412 concurrent players on Steam on launch day. Shadows' current player peak is almost equal to that of Assassin's Creed Origins (41,541), but far behind Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which peaked at 62,069 players.
Data by SteamDB
For comparison, the new game from the Japanese studio Capcom, Monster Hunter Wilds, reached 1,307,976 concurrent players immediately after its release.
However, the media predicts that the peak number of concurrent players may increase over the weekend as gamers will have more free time. In general, Assassin's Creed Shadows has received a lot of positive feedback. As of March 21, the RPG has 82% positive reviews on the gaming platform.
IGN gave the game a score of 9.2 out of 10. Like most critics, they highlight the beautifully drawn landscapes of 1500s Japan. Battles have become more aggressive and require deliberate parrying. And they call the main characters Naoe and Yasuke well developed, although most of their story unfolds along rather predictable lines.
PC Gamer's review is less positive. Reviewer Fraser Brown was disappointed by the game and "convinced that Ubisoft will never make a good RPG". He criticizes the game for not even offering the illusion of choice and for making the player "barely an active participant".
"Embarking upon any of Shadows' quests reveals the same hollowness, largely amounting to either speaking to someone or killing someone—sometimes both. There's not enough here to even call it bad quest design," Brown writes.
Earlier, there were rumors that Ubisoft was putting pressure on Valve, which owns Steam, to hide or delete information about its games' traffic on the platform after the failure of Star Wars Outlaws.
The French company also shut down its free-to-play team-based shooter XDefiant, shortly after its release.
