In brief: Ubisoft pinned a lot of hopes on Assassin's Creed Shadows. Following the disastrous launch of Star Wars Outlaws, the company was in dire need of a hit, hence why the latest AC was delayed – twice. It appears that the French giant can now breathe a sigh of relief: Shadows is Europe's best-selling new game of 2025 so far, beating the likes of Monster Hunter Wilds, Mario Kart World, and Split Fiction. But it's not the best-selling game overall.
Data shared with The Game Business by GSD, a PC and console game-sales tracking firm, shows that Assassin's Creed Shadows is the best-selling new title of 2025. However, there's emphasis on the "new" part.
While Shadows may have sold more than the brilliant Split Fiction and the very popular Mario Kart World, it's the top game to have been released this year. The best-selling game overall in 2025 so far is EA Sports FC 25, which launched in September 2024.
Shadows was delayed in the wake of Star Wars Outlaws' poor reception, with Ubisoft claiming more time was needed to add extra polish. The company wrote in a letter to investors at the time, "While the game [Shadows] is feature complete, the learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title." In January, Ubisoft issued another delay, pushing the date again, from February 14, 2025 to March 20, 2025. The extra time was apparently intended to incorporate player feedback and ensure a higher-quality Day-1 experience
With another major failure threatening the company's stability, Shadows arrived to generally good reviews from critics, and the response from most gamers has been better than expected (it has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam). I personally think it's pretty good, but certainly not in the same category of something like Split Fiction.
Elsewhere in the report, overall game sales so far this year have declined 6% year-over-year. Digital sales continue to pull even further away from physical – 52 million vs. 19.7 million – though both are down YoY. Almost three quarters of the overall PC and console market is now digital, up 2% compared to a year ago.
While unit sales were down 9% in the first 19 weeks of the year, game spending was down just 2% to 1.33 billion euros ($1.55 billion). This is due to the average selling price (ASP) of games increasing 8%.
Looking at digital only, spending was up 8% as unit sales fell 6% – again, this was due to the games' ASP rising 15%. Physical games' ASP was up just 2% as spending fell 16% and unit sales dropped by 17%.