After Ubi came crawlin' back to Steam, Assassin's Creed Shadows blasts past a million players in under 24 hours and has already smashed Valhalla's player record

Naoe and Yasuke pose against the backdrop of a burning building.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Bad news for Nobunaga and his ambitions: Assassin's Creed Shadows has parkoured past 1,000,000 players in under 24 hours. Naturally, Ubisoft immediately bragged about it on social media.

It's not even 4PM here in Canada and Assassin's Creed Shadows has already passed 1 million players!Thank YOU from the bottom of our hearts for joining this adventure in Feudal Japan. We are beyond excited to start this journey with you! 💝 pic.twitter.com/1cqwABrQfNMarch 20, 2025

Ubisoft specifies 'players' rather than 'sales' here, mind you, and I reckon there are two reasons for that. The first is that more than a few of those shinobi will have accessed the game via their Ubisoft+ subscriptions instead of buying the game outright, so it'd be inaccurate to call them buyers.

The second—and I'm making some assumptions here—is that I think Ubi delights in making my life, specifically, harder. It's never been consistent in how it reports its own success. Back when AC Valhalla was the new hotness, the company only boasted that it was its biggest PC launch ever, without giving hard numbers. So is Shadows doing better than Valhalla? Your guess is as good as mine, but Ubisoft at least seems pretty happy with how the game's doing so far.

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I'd be surprised if it wasn't doing better than the previous game in the series, though, if only because this is the first AC in a long time to hit Steam on launch day. I might be a freak in many respects, but I reckon I'm far from the only person whose policy with Ubisoft games has always been to wait for them to come unstuck from Ubisoft Connect and arrive on Steam before I finally buy them. I like having all my stuff on the same digital shelf, what can I say?

We do have some numbers, though, even if they don't come from Ubisoft itself. Shadows is sitting pretty right now with an all-time peak concurrent player count of 41,412 per SteamDB. That puts it squarely in third place, ahead of Valhalla but behind Origins and Odyssey. I'd be astounded if it didn't at least pip ahead of Origins, though—it only needs to beat its current peak by about 100 players and it's there.

Which, hey, I reckon it will. PCG's Morgan Park thought the game was pretty darn good in his Assassin's Creed Shadows review, scoring the game 80% and praising it as a "stealth action buffet" with "surprisingly great combat," even if the story didn't grab him.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.