Assassin's Creed has had a record year for engagement, well over two years after Assassin's Creed Valhalla launched.
Yesterday on February 16, Ubisoft held their third quarter financial results, featuring comments from CFO Frédérick Duguet and CEO Yves Guillemot. The two reported that the Assassin's Creed brand engagement is up by 30% over the first nine months of the fiscal year compared to the previous fiscal year.
In short, this has set a new record for player engagement with the entire Assassin's Creed brand. This is pretty damn impressive considering Assassin's Creed hasn't seen a major launch since Valhalla arrived in late 2020, debuting across last-gen and new-gen platforms and PC alike.
This new record shows Assassin's Creed Valhalla has had an incredibly successful post-launch life. Over the past two years or so, the RPG has seen three major DLC packs, culminating in the Dawn of Ragnarok expansion in 2022. These expansion packs must've been a serious hit with players, and worked wonders for bringing back veterans of Valhalla for another round with the game.
It's also probably helped that Assassin's Creed Valhalla's final story update, which launched just a few months ago in November 2022, directly set up the events of Assassin's Creed Mirage. The final story update, which was made free for all Valhalla players, set up the next big entry in the franchise via Basim, who leads the new game set in the Middle East.
Additionally, Guillemot points to Assassin's Creed's back catalog as being incredibly helpful with driving engagement. "We know that each time that we launch a new game in the franchise, all the back catalog is actually growing a lot, as well as when we launch new content on the brand," the Ubisoft CEO said, making it sound like Valhalla has driven players to try out past games in the series.
This is all fantastic news for Assassin's Creed in general and means Assassin's Creed Mirage, whenever it eventually launches, is set up for what should be a huge debut. However, there's an admission from Ubisoft that Mirage might actually be delayed into 2024. The new game was planned to launch this year, but Ubisoft's new financial results presentation had the title as launching "in 2023-24."
While it's not clear what's going on with Mirage's release date right now, the Assassin's Creed franchise is already having one hell of a good time right now.
Check out our new games 2023 guide for a look at all the games set to come out at some point this year.
