We dive in to the steam reviews for Assassin's Creed shadows. Our take: game studios should not be afraid to delay their games.
We’re almost two weeks out of the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows launch, and I think it’s fair to say we’re all pleasantly surprised to see Ubisoft’s latest title do so well!
Alongside others in the industry, Ubisoft went through a hefty round of layoffs last winter and closed a few offices, all in the wake of an already delayed launch of AC: Shadows.
Now with 3 million copies sold, we wanted to know first-hand from players, what worked, what didn’t, and see what lessons we could all learn.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">🔥 OVER 3 MILLION PLAYERS FOR AC SHADOWS! 🔥<br><br>✅2nd highest Day 1 sales revenue in Assassin's Creed franchise history<br>✅Biggest Ubisoft Day 1 ever on PlayStation Digital Store<br>✅Best community ever, with over 40 Million hours already played<br><br>Justice is forged in the Shadows. 🦅 <a href="https://t.co/ua3xbBYah9">pic.twitter.com/ua3xbBYah9</a></p>— Assassin's Creed (@assassinscreed) <a href="https://twitter.com/assassinscreed/status/1905268079958904991?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 27, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
As of March 27th, the game holds a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, with 82% of 11,406 reviews being positive. But we wanted to go beyond positive and negative, and really figure out why this game hit the nail on the head so well. And even more importantly, what other studios can learn from Ubisoft’s recent success.
At the time of our research, there were about 10,000 reviews publicly available on steam.
Now, we wanted to make sure that we were collecting quality data. It’s common that big releases like this get review bombed and spammed with garbage reviews. Upon initial analysis, we found about 3,000 reviews to be considered unusable, but with little no evidence of review bombing. It’s mostly the typical “fun,” “trash,” “fine game,” type of content that gets culled.
This is pretty standard. So tossed out everything that was less than 10 words, or provided little-to-no actual feedback to the title.
After cleaning it all up, we were left with about 7,000 reviews of reasonable quality.
So what did we find?
Well, the good news is that little stood out as particularly poor. When you make a good title that speaks well to the desires of the players and delivers something interesting, you get good results, and higher quality feedback.
But there were a handful of themes we discovered.
This didn’t really surprise us in any way, as Ubisoft has regularly performed excellently on that front. But considering that about 30% of reviews were thrown out, having a net 41% hit-rate on any positive topic is massive win!
If you browse the other community forums, Discord, and Reddit, you’ll see this theme reflected pretty frequently. Many players consider it in the top echelon of AC games, right next to Black Flag and Odyssey.
The loose takeaway is that if you’re familiar with the series, you’ll probably really like the game. But if previous titles weren’t your cup of tea, the newest rendition is not likely to change anything for you.
There were other common threads found, also mostly expected – excellent soundtrack, smooth gameplay, and good performance.
We couldn’t find too much that was remarkable from the generated results, so we dug with a little more nuance to the game. We wanted to know exactly what made this title work so well when others didn’t.
And there was even more praise for the simple fact that skill points and XP were attributed to both, even while only playing one. It helped avoid the ability curve becoming too distant between the two.
Ironically enough, the largest complaint was the seasons changing when switching between players. Something about scenery that players simply fall in love with.
Aside from the large amount of commentary around characters and general gameplay there were a handful of small, but notable patterns.
The most loved features?
1. Hideouts — 65 mentions
2. Auto-following NPCs — 28 mentions
The most missed?
Auto-pathing functions from previous games. Multiple mentions of not having to hold down a button to follow a path was more immersive and enjoyable than the latest reiteration. Something to think about.
There was a lot of great things to say about the game. But what about the bad?
Negative feedback was largely focused on a two key areas: cutscenes and third-party launchers.
Over 250 (2.6%) individual reviews mentioned two primary complaints: the first three hours of the game involve infrequent actual gameplay, and the cutscenes are locked at 30 FPS. Perhaps there’s a reason why Ubisoft made that decision to lock the frame rate so low, but it doesn’t look good when 60 FPS is considered the standard in any modern title.
Ask any dev, and they will tell you that the first few hours (or even minutes) are the most critical of any game. And for Ubisoft to spend so much time walking the player in and our of cutscenes, and locked at 30 FPS, causing these weird context switches was frustrating to a lot of players. While hopefully not driving too many refunds, it clearly was a problem for many users.
Moving on to bugs. The game seems to have launched with a reasonably low rate of game-killing bugs. The largest singular bug pattern we could identify was DLSS issues, mentioned in about 3.5% of player reviews.
And lastly, the Ubisoft launcher.
It’s no mystery that players dislike 3rd-party game launchers. We all understand the UX simply isn’t great. Nobody wants to click “Play” on a game, only to be bothered with a sign-in, anti-cheat, launcher update, and more before they can even open the main menu.
But there is evidence to say that the distaste it slowing. Whether this is because certain launchers are better than others, or it’s just a generally accepted fate, we don’t know for now. But a poor launcher doesn’t bode well for a first-touch experience.
In fact, of those 215 reviews that complained about launcher problems, 82 were refunded. In the scope of millions of players, this is only a drop in the bucket, but it does remind us that those first few interactions are critical to a game’s success.
With all that said, it’s wonderful to see a studio go through so many struggles, layoffs, delays, and challenges, to see this degree of launch success.
We’ll never know the counterfactual reality, but the delay from November 20th to March 15th might have been the best decision Ubisoft could have made this year.
And if you weren’t sure:
Less than .1% of reviews mentioned the game being unfinished or needing more time. When was the last time you saw a AAA studio launch a game to this level of completion?
Time after time we are seeing games launch with less-than-expected success due to shareholders pressing for promised launch dates, rather than letting a project bake for the time it needs. But this is a clear example of how the reception of games is fragile, and you need to spend time necessary to do it right.
Listen to your players, know when something isn’t resonating, and make the changes necessary.
We’re very fortunate that the folks over at Valve continue to let Steam data be public. It’s an enormous source of information for individual players, small teams like us, and game studios around the world to understand what’s going on in the industry.
We’ve watched first-hand as player’s expectations get stronger and more vocal. And after watching major studios completely burn 100s of millions of dollars on games like Concord, we saw how listening to player and community feedback is more important than ever.
And at the same time, we know that organizing and retrieving 100% of your most valuable feedback is effectively impossible.
It’s almost daily that we hear from developers, community managers, and product teams that they love their teams, love their jobs, and can’t meet expectations while at risk of getting laid off because studios don’t perform?
Our mission is to make player feedback the fastest and most direct way to make game decisions that stick.
And with Kinn, game studios of all sizes can connect, organize, and understand their entire feedback pipeline in ways they never have before.
Whether you’re a solo dev, or an enterprise operation, we would love to see how we can work with you to make games players love.
We love playing incredible games, and we want to support the industry to build more.
You can always schedule a demo with us at Kinn.gg.
Lastly, our team has decided that we want to keep doing these open inquiries of big titles causing ripples in the community. I am personally a massive Civilization fan. So, naturally, we’re going to run an analysis on Civilization VII and see what we can find.
Want to see results from a particular game? Let us know.
Cheers!
Listening to your players is a necessary, but impossible task. We’re building Kinn.gg to solve it.To succeed in 2025, game studios need to listen more to their players. But listening to players uniquely challenging. We're building Kinn to solve that problem.
What 10,000 steam reviews say about Assassin’s Creed: ShadowsWe dive in to the steam reviews for Assassin's Creed shadows. Our take: game studios should not be afraid to delay their games.