Assassin's Creed Valhalla breaks launch records as Ubisoft praises "transition to the RPG model"

Assassin's Creed Valhalla
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Assassin's Creed Valhalla and its two ancestors are breaking Ubisoft records for player engagement, and it looks like RPG integration is here to stay for the future of the franchise.

Ubisoft hosted a conference call with investors and analysts today, where the company offered some deeper insights into its performance in its latest fiscal quarter. That quarter included the launch of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which was the biggest launch ever for an Assassin's Creed game. It was also a big month for Assassin's Creed Odyssey - even bigger than December 2019, even though it was a year older by that point.

"On the back catalog side of the Assassin's franchise, Odyssey and Origins continue to benefit from the transition to the RPG model, and to the additional boost brought by Valhalla," Duguet explained. "As an illustration, there were more daily average users on Odyssey in December 2020 than in December 2019, which testifies to the impressive current dynamic of the brand. The combined strong release of Valhalla and the back catalog momentum enabled the franchise to break, by far, the new record of Ubisoft brands over 9 months."

While it's great news for older Assassin's Creed games, Ubisoft also pointed out in the call that Valhalla is doing even better, with double the people playing Valhalla on a daily basis as they did in the same timeframe for Odyssey. With how thoroughly the recent Assassin's Creed games have revitalized the 13-year-old franchise, it's looking increasingly unlikely that Ubisoft will turn back from their new open-world RPG direction any time soon.

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Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.

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