Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot has openly addressed the intense backlash toward the open-world samurai-ninja adventure Assassin’s Creed Shadows, claiming that the shift from “gameplay to ideology” was responsible for its delay from November 15, 2024 to February 14, 2025.
According to a November 5 Game File report, Guillemot showed a video to an audience of games industry insiders during the first day of Paris Games Week, which ran from October 30 to November 2 at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. The video was 184 seconds long, professionally narrated, and detailed Ubisoft’s response to the vitriol the company faced.
“What happens when a legendary franchise reveals one of its most anticipated experiences? … Only to become the game everyone loves to hate?” the narrator asks at the start of the video. “When conversation shifts from gameplay to ideology? When everything you say only adds fuel to the fire? And when the voices you thought were with you actually turn against you.”
The video’s narrator described the ire Ubisoft experienced after it revealed Shadows in 2024. To combat the ferocity, the company “had to stop focusing on those who hated us [and] start firing up our allies.” Doing that meant one thing, according to the narrator: Ubisoft had to lean on The Assassin’s Creed brand.
“We started by doing the last thing anyone would have advised. We delayed the game,” the narrator continued. “The extra time allowed the devs to polish, optimize, and reach the high standards fans expect from an Assassin’s Creed game. It also gave us time to rebuild the Assassin’s Creed brand pact, putting the markers of the franchise back at the center. More hood, more stealth, more leap of faith, more lore. So we could show that the spirit of Assassin’s Creed lives on in Shadows.”
The video lathers on this corporate speak for the rest of its runtime, according to a transcript in that November 5 Game File report. The narrator says that, by showing the game and letting the experience speak for itself, Ubisoft won fans back, shifted the conversation, and found the confidence to “stand tall, to take risks, to speak up, even against the loudest haters.” There’s no explicit mention of who the “haters” were, and Guillemot doesn’t define the backlash Shadows faced in his remarks after the video either. However, he did hint at the “fake fights” caused by the tension between gameplay and history.
“We were initially surprised by the extent of the attacks,” Guillemot said. “And we quickly realized that it was a battle, a battle with our fans, to demonstrate that we were, in fact, more of a video game than a message.
“What we saw is that, by allowing our fans to see in the game–everything they were going to be able to rediscover–of what they love about Assassin’s Creed, [that] ultimately helped to combat this aggression, which is linked to the fact that video games have a very strong impact on the people who play them,” Guillemot continued. “And so they’re kind of caught between ‘I want to play, and what interests me is self-expression within a game’ and ‘there is a cultural message that comes with the video game.’ So our goal is really to be able to ensure that our fans discover and defend what they expect from our games. It very quickly eliminated the fights, which were just fake fights.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows received intense backlash for Yasuke, a Black slave who became a retainer for Oda Nobunaga, making him a samurai by association. The game was slammed for everything from being “woke propaganda” to featuring historical inaccuracies, and grew so intense that Ubisoft reportedly canceled a Civil War-inspired Assassin’s Creed game as a direct result. Despite all the controversy surrounding Shadows’ Black co-protagonist, the game still reached five million players just five months after its February 14 launch.
The game, which received an 8/10 in GameSpot’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows review, received the Claws of Awaji expansion that introduced tons of new content. It’s also making its way to Nintendo Switch 2 in December, with preorders for this port of the game now live.
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