Assassin's Creed Shadows reaches 1 million players on day one, and it sounds like even Ubisoft's having a tough time believing it: "It's not even 4PM here"

Assassin's Creed Shadows is seemingly off to a very fast start, as – mere hours after the open-world RPG's launch – Ubisoft has announced that the game has already reached more than 1 million players.

"It's not even 4PM here in Canada and Assassin's Creed Shadows has already passed 1 million players," Ubisoft said in a tweet. "Thank YOU from the bottom of our hearts for joining this adventure in Feudal Japan. We are beyond excited to start this journey with you!"

Not even a day after the Assassin's Creed Shadows release time, that's an impressive milestone.

Ubisoft specifies "players" rather than "sales" here, which means some number of these players will have jumped in through Ubisoft Plus, the subscription service the company has made available on PC, Xbox, and, uh, Amazon Luna.

Exactly how Assassin's Creed Shadows' success measures up to other entries in the series isn't entirely clear, because Ubisoft has never been entirely consistent on how it reports numbers like these. The company said that Assassin's Creed Valhalla was the biggest launch in series history back when it released in 2020, but didn't give precise player or sales numbers at the time.

We do know that Shadows' concurrent player count on Steam has surpassed that of Valhalla's, but that comes with the important caveat that Valhalla only hit Steam years after its original release. Shadows is now just over 100 players shy of taking Origins' Steam record, and about 20,000 shy of Odyssey's, and neither of those games suffer the same caveat of a late launch on Valve's platform.

Assassin's Creed Shadows ranks pretty high on our list of the best Assassin's Creed games.