'Assassin's Creed Shadows' to finally debut in March for Mac
Following a series of delays, Ubisoft's "Assassin's Creed Shadows" is set to finally debut on March 20 across platforms including Mac, and at a later date, iPad.
Assassin's Creed Shadows will launch on March 20 for Mac, PC, and consoles.
takes the iconic franchise to 16th-century feudal Japan. Players will be able to switch between two protagonists of completely different backgrounds and skills: a Shinobi assassin and a legendary samurai.
The dual-character approach allows for diverse gameplay mechanics and storylines, as players will be able to switch between stealth and combat missions that take place across the detailed landscape.
The game itself was originally announced in May 2024 and was later promoted during Apple's WWDC presentation in June of that same year. At the time, Assassin's Creed Shadows was scheduled for a November 2024 release across all supported platforms, including Apple Silicon Macs, PCs, and consoles.
In September 2024, however, Ubisoft announced that its latest Assassin's Creed game would not debut until February 2025. The game then experienced additional delays, with the final release date being March 20, 2025, as per the Apple Developer website.
While Assassin's Creed Shadows can be purchased via the macOS App Store for $69.99, it's not playable just yet. There's still a "Coming Soon" label attached to the title. Even so, once the game launches, it will be available on Mac, PC, and various game consoles, which is practically unheard of in the world of AAA games.
Apple and Ubisoft say the game will launch on iPad at a later date.
Most games launch as console or PC exclusives and only reach the Mac long after their initial debut. Ubisoft, meanwhile, has expressed significant interest in the Mac platform, with executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote saying that it's "been a longtime dream to bring the game to Mac."
Ubisoft was able to leverage many Apple-exclusive features, including Metal 3, unified memory, and hardware-based ray tracing, which is available on Macs with M3 or M4 chips. The game's dynamic biomes, lighting, and weather conditions allow for an incredibly detailed in-game environment, which will be available on Macs and iPads with an M-series Apple Silicon chip.
"Seeing those millions of lines of code work natively on a Mac was a feeling that's hard to describe," said the game's executive producer. "When you look at the game's performance, the curve Apple is on with successive improvements to the M-series chips year after year, and the way the game looks on an HDR screen, you're like, 'Is this real?'"
Assassin's Creed Shadows also strives for historical accuracy by attempting to mimic 16th-century Japan down to the smallest detail, such as the exact shades of varnish found on wooden structures of the time. There's also a heavy focus on immersion, as the game itself is available in Japanese as well as English.
Cote ultimately believes that "the future is bright for gaming" on the Mac platform, indicating that we'll likely see additional Ubisoft games on Apple devices in the future. As Mac hardware continues to improve with each iteration, gamers will gain access to even more detailed games, hopefully without delays.
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https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBI.PA/
Their running costs are around $1.5b per year with around 20 studios. They've made a lot of games:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2010%E2%80%932019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2020%E2%80%93present
To cover operating costs, they'd still have to publish cross-platform but there's room for timed exclusives and spin-off exclusives for iOS/Mac.
They could run it the way Microsoft runs their internal XBox game studios with an independent CEO, similar to how Claris is setup as an Apple subsidiary with a CEO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris
They could also license out the studio's game engines to rival Epic's Unreal Engine, which also ensures more games are Mac compatible.
If it doesn't work out, they would just make the company publicly-owned again or sell them to another buyer.
Ubisoft also owns the streaming rights for Call of Duty and Activision games as part of the anti-trust deal Microsoft made to buy Activision:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23915780/ubisoft-activision-blizzard-microsoft-cloud-gaming-rights-deal-explained
Apple could have a streaming system as part of Apple Arcade that would allow streaming games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty to all their devices.