Assassin's Creed Shadows has been out for less than one week, and the drama that has surrounded this game's release might actually be more entertaining than the game itself. While the media has praised Shadows as a "return to form" for Ubisoft, many gamers and critics of the once beloved franchise have been less than thrilled with the quality of this latest Assassin's Creed entry.
To make matters worse, Ubisoft has yet to release actual sales numbers. Instead, they have relied on the media to spin a narrative that Shadows has reached "2 million players," without specifying how many of them were actual sales versus subscribers of Ubisoft+. Things reached a fever pitch on Twitter/X yesterday, when Elon Musk responded to influencer Grummz, after he criticized Ubisoft's decision to sponsor Hasan Abi. Hasan has famously been very vocal in his support of and for platforming terrorists, which makes the decision by Ubisoft to pay him to shill their game a very questionable one.
After Elon labeled Hasan Abi a "sellout" and stated that he was promoting a terrible game just for the money, the official Assassin's Creed account clapped back by saying, "Is that what the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you?" This of course is a reference to when Asmongold and other content creators called out the billionaire tech mogul for lying about his achievements on a game, and Elon was forced to admit that he was sharing an account with someone else.
Grummz, aka Mark Kern, tried to come to the defense of Elon Musk by sharing a screenshot of an article claiming that Shadows isn't the hit Ubisoft needs. The Assassin's Creed account then savaged Grummz, roasting him over the controversy of which he is at the heart of due to his still undelivered crowdfunded game Em8er, by simply replying, "Our game is out."
What many found remarkable was the level of interaction that these replies earned, easily ratioing a significantly larger account like Elon's in a very short timespan. This has since led to unverified claims that Ubisoft is using bots to artificially boost their engagement on these posts, as this could be seen as a last ditch effort to boost their ever declining Steam numbers.
While this is entirely possible, claims of using bots on Twitter/X are not a new thing, as the platform is notoriously rampant with them. Grummz was even accused of botting, due to his reply seeing wildly different numbers of likes over a short period of time. As it is difficult to prove the use of bots one way or the other, the potential outcome of this interaction is a much more intriguing topic, as this viral social media spat may have actually led to an increase in sales for Shadows on the Steam platform.
The First Berserker: Khazan, an action RPG from Nexon, was released in advanced access two days ago. It quickly climbed the sales charts on Steam, passing Assassin's Creed Shadows and finding itself at the #4 slot as of yesterday. At the same time, Shadows had fallen all the way down to the #6 spot. (As Khazan is still in advanced access, we are going to be using the top sellers chart as a comparison until we actually have a live player count for both games)
After the viral interactions that occurred on X yesterday, Shadows has now climbed back to the #4 spot, bumping rival RPG Khazan down to #5. While this is not proof of botting, it certainly seems that Ubisoft has benefited slightly from this virtual beatdown of several of their critics. While many people are now claiming that they have purchased the game due to Assassin's Creed's fiery social media manager, the slight increase in sales might not be significant enough to help Ubisoft dig itself out of the 5 year financial hole that they currently find themselves in.