Assassin's Creed: Odyssey player count soared for the first time in years since Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey adaptation released earlier this month, according to data gathered by Alinea Analytics.
Alinea head of market analysis Rhys Elliott explains in a new post on Substack that, once The Odyssey zapped onto IMAX screens on July 17, "the cultural spillover into games was immediate." 10 days later, Ubisoft's 2018 ancient Greek adventure Assassin's Creed: Odyssey had nearly doubled its active player count, swelling from an approximate total of 122,000 players to 233,000 across platforms.
"That's a 90% surge in engagement," says Elliott, "at 1.8x the game's pre-film July baseline." But unlike the Greeks as they piled into their Trojan horse, most recent Assassin's Creed: Odyssey players are unwilling to risk more than a boring afternoon. Only 26% of the action RPG's new recruits came from Steam, while PlayStation players went off like a car alarm up 94% to 114,000 daily active users, and Xbox boomed plus-134% from 36,000 to 84,000 active users.
Probably, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey's luck on console came from PS Plus and Game Pass subscribers – even with Game Pass currently limping toward death. Elliott says, "Lapsed fans jumped straight back in, while new players found a 60+ hour Greek epic waiting inside a subscription they already pay for."
Though, Nolan's The Odyssey also blessed Ubisoft's Odyssey with some fresh sales. "Software sales moved modestly at around 400K copies year-to-date," Elliott says, but the real news "is pure player engagement. The film didn't make millions buy an eight-year-old game, but it got a massive cohort playing it again. That data gives Ubisoft great ammunition for an eventual AC Odyssey Resynced."
The developer's recent Black Flag Resynced has been a gargantuan financial success for Ubisoft, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it capitalize further on Nolan fever – if it stops laying off devs long enough to do so.
