Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a game that was set to be released in February of 2025 as a part of one of the longest running video game franchises out there. Ubisoft, the French company behind this franchise, decided to set their next game in feudal Japan and draw in a wide variety of audiences with one specific tactic that ended up undoing their entire marketing campaign and resulting in a lot of refunded preorders. So, what exactly happened?
There were two mistakes that Ubisoft made when it came to promoting their content. Firstly, it decided to market the wrong ideas to the wrong demographic. Although Ubisoft is a French company, their markets are primarily in the United States, Canada, and the Eastern countries, such as China, Japan, and South Korea. The French, typically leaning more to the political left in their ideas, decided to introduce a playable African American samurai into a feudal Japanese setting to “appeal to wider amounts of audiences”. While Canada leans politically left, Americans were upset due to a cultural DEI fatigue, and the Japanese were equally if not more upset due to their culture highly valuing tradition and national pride. While the entire fanbase was not up in arms due to this reason, the other mistake that Ubisoft made pushed the quantity of upset stakeholders into the majority.
Ubisoft’s second mistake was breaking their promise and losing their focus. Assassin’s Creed is a franchise founded on historical accuracy when telling stories, while writing in events of their own to go along in tandem with history and tell a new story that would put a new perspective or “twist” on stories that actually happened. Ubisoft set customers’ expectations when it came to this historical accuracy by producing all of their games with this thought in mind, however not so much when it came to Shadows. While there was a man of his color in Japan at that time, Yasuke as we find out he is called, was no more than a mere exotic novelty and was not a grand general of a Japanese army. Additionally, Ubisoft decided to make a historical figure, that being Yasuke, a playable one, which also strayed from its original focus, and ultimately drove its player base to end up protesting the pre-ordering of the game.
The fundamental lesson to learn from Ubisoft: your content and product/service qualities and focuses have to match, otherwise you won’t get far and will end up with far less revenue than if you had taken the time to deliver what your customers/stakeholders need.
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