Assassin's Creed Shadows, the latest game in the long-running Assassin's Creed series of stealth action-adventure games, has launched to the franchise's highest Steam player count of all time.
As spotted by the folks at Dexerto, Shadows' peak player count on Steam hit 64,825 over the weekend. At time of writing, that's still the game's peak; 43,263 players are currently enjoying Shadows, which still isn't bad considering today is a Monday.
That figure puts Assassin's Creed Shadows slightly ahead of Greek epic Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which managed to achieve a peak player count of 62,069 around the time of its release. There's not much in it, but Assassin's Creed Shadows is officially the series' biggest Steam launch.
If you're wondering how the game stacks up against other Ubisoft releases, it still can't quite hold a candle to the publisher's biggest Steam launches ever, at least not according to SteamDB's numbers.
Ubisoft's biggest Steam launch ever was the crunchy melee brawler For Honor, which achieved an impressive 225,831 peak player count in August 2018. It's followed by Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege's peak of 201,933, with The Division's 114,228 (a very satisfying number) putting it in a comfortable third.
Despite the fact that Assassin's Creed Shadows can't reach those lofty heights, its success will doubtless come as a relief to Ubisoft, given that the game hasn't exactly had an easy time of it in recent months.
Announced last year, Shadows was originally set to launch in November, but was subsequently delayed to February as Ubisoft announced it would rethink some of its business practices (including releasing PC games on Steam on day one in future).
The game was then delayed again, with publisher Ubisoft closing down three of its locations and revealing its intention to pursue further cost-cutting measures after a pretty dire third-quarter performance.
It remains to be seen whether Assassin's Creed Shadows can single-handedly turn Ubisoft's fortunes around, but the game is available right now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. You can read our Andrew's review of the game here.
