We can’t really stop talking about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, so we won’t! Because of this, we wanted to talk a bit about the financial success Valhalla is. In this Stratigraph, we take a closer look at the monetary gains Ubisoft made from some Viking looting.

Personally, I’m not sure whether I like or dislike Valhalla. It has it’s good moments, but can also be extremely repetitive at times. We’ve seen many hot takes (Kotaku) on the game and it’s contents, and some more substantiated takes on the presentation of a certain history in Valhalla (Interactive Pasts). However, if we put that all aside, it must be said that the game is a financial success for Ubisoft.

Eurogamer has reported that Ubisoft raked up $1.2 billion revenue over the past quarter, mainly driven by the succes of Valhalla. Even though Ubisoft hasn’t disclosed how much money the vikings have brought in the bank, it did mention how Valhalla has become the highest earning game from the Assassin’s Creed series. That’s quite a feat since the game is out for just over three months now. It was already known that the game was the biggest AC game on launch, racking over 3.5 million copies sold in launch week (Eurogamer).

2020 also saw some other hits for Ubisoft, as Watch Dogs: Legion was one of the top selling games on the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, aside from Valhalla. Valhalla’s success also comes with an added bonus for Ubisoft, especially on PC, as they have moved the launch from Steam to Epic, drasticly cutting down on the fee they pay for this digital distribution.

With three AAA titles coming out next year, Ubisoft stated it wanted to focus more on free-to-play titles and live service components. It’s not a business model I’m particulary fond of, but it is unfortunately one that will stick. Ubisoft has already announced a new season of paid DLC for Anno 1800 (Eurogamer), and more content like this is definitely upcoming. Let’s hope we will not get an Assassin’s Creed game where the hidden blade is a DLC.

Omar ‘oomzer’ Bugter is a Cultural Historian from Utrecht. Since interning at VALUE, he’s stuck around, mainly working on the Interactive Pasts website and the weekly streams. He wrote a thesis on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI and mods, so knows this game very well. He likes many other games, including F1 2020, Hearts of Iron, Mount & Blade and Crusader Kings III., and is VALUE’s in house city builder connaisseur. Tweet to him at @oomzer if you want to know anything about Civ or city builders.