It’s been a reasonably grim few years for Ubisoft – buffeted by allegations of an abusive tradition, tormented by dismal inventory market efficiency, and seemingly unable to end up the type of hit titles that would silence its detractors, the firm has seen its technique and its future brazenly known as into query.
Late 2024 was a low level. Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially and the firm’s different nice hope for that interval, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, was pushed again into 2025 after changing into the goal of a web based outrage marketing campaign over its alternative of protagonist characters. Consequently, there have most likely been some heartfelt sighs of reduction at the firm as the gross sales figures for Shadows lastly began to roll in over the previous few weeks.
We do not have exact numbers but, however whereas Shadows doesn’t appear set to interrupt any data, nor is it doing badly by any affordable measure, and in the US no less than, it is reportedly running in second place in the annual sales charts thus far. It is trailing solely Capcom’s immensely profitable Monster Hunter Wilds.
It is laborious to overstate how necessary this is for Ubisoft. The Assassin’s Creed franchise typically flies beneath the radar just a little in comparison with different powerhouse franchises, as a result of it isn’t a bankable annual occasion like Name of Responsibility or an entire gross sales juggernaut like Grand Theft Auto.
Nonetheless, it is a franchise whose mainline entries have the type of broad shopper enchantment many different IP holders would promote their grandmothers to achieve. The final main entry in the collection, 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, comfortably clocked up over a billion {dollars} in income, and the franchise total has offered over 200 million video games, placing it in roughly the identical bracket as Remaining Fantasy or Resident Evil for lifetime franchise gross sales. It is not fairly sufficiently big to be the single tentpole IP that holds up all of Ubisoft, however it’s the closest factor the firm has to that. If the Murderer’s Creed franchise was truly to lose its mojo, it is truthfully laborious to think about what Ubisoft’s business path forwards would seem like.
One of the largest issues is that such manufactured controversy is extremely random in nature
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was due to this fact a make-or-break title – and earlier than the delay and the manufactured controversy, it seemed like a shoo-in. Followers had been clamouring for the closely ninja-inspired collection to do an instalment set in Japan for years; Assassin’s Creed Shadows is, on paper no less than, an ideal instance of giving your fanbase exactly what they need most. We don’t but understand how Shadows has stacked as much as Ubisoft’s inner gross sales expectations, however the optimistic buzz round the gross sales information and the typically optimistic responses to the recreation from customers recommend that it is finished what it was alleged to do – specifically, proved that the AC franchise nonetheless has fuel in the tank at a vital juncture for the firm.
The very fact that we even must have this dialog (“they set an Assassin’s Creed recreation in Japan and it offered nicely” would have felt like the most staggeringly apparent factor only some years in the past) is largely all the way down to the aforementioned controversy – a really intense “anti-woke” marketing campaign towards the recreation, which was sparked off when it was revealed that the playable protagonists can be a Black man and a lady. As is typically the case with these items, the preliminary racist and misogynistic backlash was rapidly veiled in additional broad-based concern trolling, alleging that Shadows was disrespectful or derogatory in direction of Japanese tradition and faith generally.
Issues received very foolish, in a short time. A historian who consulted on the recreation’s depiction of its Black protagonist, Yasuke – a traditionally attested determine who has been featured uncontroversially in a lot of media over the years – was focused by on-line harassment and it was falsely reported that he had been dismissed by his college.
Twitter discovered itself dwelling to a gradual inflow of accounts claiming to be outraged Japanese players who occurred to submit in fluent English and really clearly Google Translated Japanese. A number of enterprising Japanese right-wing influencers did attempt to make hay from the controversy, albeit with restricted success; one broadly shared video wherein a creator raged about the recreation permitting him to smash up a Shinto shrine was broadly ridiculed by commenters, who identified somewhat fairly that the creator himself was the one smashing the digital shrine and getting mad about his personal actions.
The marketing campaign’s excessive water mark got here when a lawmaker in Japan’s Food plan requested the Prime Minister about defacing shrines in the recreation throughout an open query session. The questioner, Kada Hiroyuki, is a comparatively unknown one-term Councillor whose marginal seat is at extreme danger in the upcoming July election, so it was a reasonably clear seize for consideration. PM Ishiba’s reply fully sidestepped any point out of the recreation to focus as a substitute on some current instances the place real-life shrines have been vandalised. Nonetheless, it was translated (or in some instances, wilfully mistranslated) as a triumph: get woke, go so broke that they’re going to ask time-wasting questions on you in the Japanese Food plan, I suppose.
Storied recreation director and distinctive Twitter poster Kamiya Hideki, maybe unsurprisingly, had the most level-headed tackle the complete affair, mentioning in essence that when a fuss like this is being made by a comparatively small group of extraordinarily vocal individuals, it means little to a big majority of strange folks who will merely shrug their shoulders and quietly get pleasure from the recreation. The gross sales figures now trickling in recommend that he was basically proper.
By the way, in the supposedly incensed and insulted Japanese market, bodily gross sales of the recreation are sitting at round 25,000 – removed from a smash hit, however fairly strong for a PS5 launch in that territory. Again of the envelope calculations recommend that complete gross sales in Japan are most likely broadly consistent with 2020’s Valhalla, considering the huge switchover from bodily to digital gross sales that’s occurred in that timeframe. For comparability, Monster Hunter Wilds offered lower than half as many bodily copies as 2018’s MH World in its first week, however nonetheless offered considerably extra copies total as soon as digital is factored in.
These varieties of controversies round video games and different kinds of media have turn into commonplace lately, and plenty of corporations wrestle to determine how a lot consideration to pay to them, or how greatest to reply. One of the largest issues is that such manufactured controversy is extremely random in nature; corporations making an attempt to determine easy methods to keep away from being the goal of this type of hate marketing campaign are basically setting out on a wholly fruitless quest, as a result of there’s little rhyme or cause to the particular alignment of planets that flip a particular recreation or firm into the right-wing punching bag of the week.
Fully excluding complete swathes of ethnicities and identities out of your recreation fully is probably way more commercially damaging than any on-line hate marketing campaign is likely to be – and even then, the stochastic finger of web outrage should still find yourself pointing at some member of your group, some seemingly innocuous public assertion, and even one thing fully made up from complete material.
Stick with your weapons and launch the greatest recreation you possibly can – it is not simply AC Shadows that shows this to be an efficient strategy
The triggers for these outbursts solely appear apparent in hindsight. I’ve seen individuals argue that Ubisoft was intentionally upsetting a response by selecting Black and feminine protagonists, however when the firm selected to make use of Yasuke as a protagonist, it was doing so off the again of well-received depictions of him in video games like Nioh and Samurai Warriors, a extremely rated Netflix anime collection primarily based on his life, and his position as inspiration for the massively common Afro Samurai anime collection.
None of these had triggered a lot as the barest whisper of controversy. Yasuke appeared like a protected guess, to not point out an ideal determine for the narrative, being that he was a complete outsider who moved by some of the most attention-grabbing occasions of Japanese historical past. (As for the lengthy historical past of common, uncontroversial depictions of feminine ninjas, the place to even begin?)
Incorrect place, incorrect time, incorrect facet of mattress to get out of; these reactions are unattainable to foretell, and making an attempt to design video games “defensively” to keep away from individuals on the Web getting mad at you is prone to trigger way more hurt in the future than the ravings of any quantity of sock puppet accounts might.
Furthermore, Ubisoft appears to have set out a fairly respectable playbook for easy methods to cope with this type of marketing campaign when it does occur. The state of affairs round Shadows was exacerbated by the delay to the recreation, which was interpreted as panic on Ubisoft’s facet and a sniff of blood in the water for its detractors. In actuality, any panic was fully all the way down to Star Wars Outlaws’ underperformance, not something taking place on-line. Shadows was delayed to not take away or change content material that its detractors deemed objectionable, however somewhat to make sure the recreation was polished and top quality at launch, which is just about the greatest response there is to such bad-faith criticisms.
Stick with your weapons and launch the greatest recreation you possibly can – it is not simply Assassin’s Creed Shadows that shows this to be an efficient strategy. Aggressively anti-woke campaigns towards video games like Baldur’s Gate 3 have even tried to activate a dime and declare that the recreation is truly on their facet of the argument when it grew to become clear that it was immensely profitable and common.
That won’t totally occur to AC Shadows, which is unlikely to be fairly the business juggernaut or the important darling that BG3 was, however the lesson is clear – simply as Kamiya steered, a important mass of strange individuals taking part in and having fun with a recreation will simply overpower the attain and quantity of a small bad-faith negative marketing campaign.