Ubisoft is currently facing strong headwinds as it struggles to rebuild trust among both players and analysts. Despite a lavish push behind Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin's Creed: Shadows, the French publisher hasn't quite managed to convince the market. Shadows may have been considered a sales success in Ubisoft's own books — even topping the charts in Europe as the year's best-selling new release and reaching second place in the US — but Outlaws turned out to be a much tougher story to sugar-coat.
What's truly interesting, however, is how Ubisoft has handled the numbers. Up until June this year, the company reported sales data to the analytics firm Circana, making it clear that Assassin's Creed: Shadows was sitting in third place on the US sales chart. But in July, both Shadows and Outlaws disappeared, not because of collapsing sales, but because Ubisoft simply stopped sharing its data.
On social media, Circana's executive director Mat Piscatella confirmed this, and many have interpreted the move as an attempt by Ubisoft to control the narrative. Keeping figures under wraps is rarely a healthy sign, and more often signals weak performance, even if the reality may be more nuanced. Still, given the controversy surrounding both games, this decision risks fuelling even greater mistrust among players and critics alike.
So far, Ubisoft has not commented on — or explained — why it decided to stop reporting its sales numbers.
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