Assassin's Creed Shadows Was the Best-Selling Game in the U.S. for March
Assassin’s Creed Shadows debuted last month to become the best-selling game in the U.S. for March 2025 in dollar sales.
This is according to analytics firm Circana, which reports that Shadows has also become the second best-selling game so far this year, trailing only Monster Hunter: Wilds and ahead of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. It was also the best-selling game on Xbox in March, and second best-selling game on PlayStation and Steam.
We reached out to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella for a bit more context on Assassin’s Creed: Shadows’ success. He told us that Shadows’ launch was the third-biggest in franchise history in the U.S., following Assassin’s Creed 3 and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. “It’s a great start, so now we’ll have to see where it goes from here.”
Last month, Ubisoft created a subsidiary company based on its Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six brands, with a €1.16 billion (approx. $1.25 billion) investment from Chinese megacorp Tencent.
The news came after Ubisoft announced Assassin’s Creed Shadows had passed the 3 million player mark. Ubisoft suffered a number of high-profile flops, layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations in the run up to Shadows’ release, and there is enormous pressure on it to succeed after the company’s share price hit an historic low.
Other stats reported by Ubisoft were already revealed by IGN’s coverage of an internal email in which the company contextualized Shadows’ opening weekend performance, saying it was better compared to Origins and Odyssey rather than the “perfect storm” 2020’s Valhalla launched into.
Shadows saw the second highest day-one sales revenue in Assassin’s Creed franchise history, behind only Valhalla, the biggest Ubisoft day-one ever on the PlayStation Store, and has seen over 40 million hours played so far.
March was a big month for new releases, with seven of the top 20 games entering the charts for the first time, including WWE 2K24 (No.4), Split Fiction (No.5), Bleach: Rebirth of Souls (No.9), Xenoblade Chronicles X (No.17), and Suikoden I & II HD Remaster: Gate Rune & Dunan Unification Wars (No.18). Hello Kitty Island Adventure also ranked No. 4 on Nintendo Switch specifically in its console debut, and free-to-play game FragPunk debuted at No.8 in the Top 10 Steam charts ranked by Monthly Active Users (MAUs).
In second place this month, just behind Assassin’s Creed, was another debut title: MLB: The Show 25, which was also the best-selling game for the month on PlayStation. Its sales were 23% higher than its predecessor, MLB The Show 24, during the same debut month last year.
Other games doing well in March included Fortnite, which led all games in MAUs on both Xbox and PlayStation, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which leapt from No.103 in February to No.10 in March on PlayStation specifically thanks to being added to PS+. Co-op horror game R.E.P.O. made a similar leap from No.93 in its debut month of February to No.1 in March on the Steam MAU charts, likely due to growing social media virality over time.
Despite all these exciting new releases doing pretty well for themselves, March was actually a bit of a low month for games as a whole. Overall games spending dropped 6% year-over-year to $4.7 billion, and content spending dropped 4% year-over-year to $4.2 billion, Circana reports. Non-mobile subscriptions and digital premium downloads on console were the only content areas showing growth.
I asked Piscatella for context as to why content spend was down, and he pointed to mobile as the primary perpetrator. Mobile spending, per SensorTower’s report, was down 6% year-over-year.
“Mobile being such a big component of content means that a dip there usually means the market dips. Console full game download spending was up this March. But declines in mobile and drops in PC full game spend and a drop in digital add on content spending meant overall content fell.”
As for hardware, spending was down 25% year-over-year to $286 million, the lowest March spending total since 2019 ($279 million). PlayStation 5 was the best-selling console of the month, but its sales were still down 26% year-over-year. Xbox took second place, down 9% year-over-year, and Switch sales were down 37% from last year, likely in anticipation of the impending successor, the Nintendo Switch 2.
March 2025 U.S. Top 20 Best-Selling Games:
- Assassin’s Creed: Shadows (NEW)
- MLB: The Show 25* (NEW)
- Monster Hunter: Wilds
- WWE 2K25 (NEW)
- Split Ficton (NEW)
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
- PGA Tour 2K25
- NBA 2K25
- Bleach: Rebirth of Souls (NEW)
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
- Minecraft*
- Grand Theft Auto V
- EA Sports FC 25
- Red Dead Redemption II
- Madden NFL 25
- Elden Ring
- Xenoblade Chronicles X* (NEW)
- Suikoden I & II Remaster: Gate Rune & Dunan Unificaiton Wars (NEW)
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- EA Sports College Football 25
* Indicates that some or all digital sales are not included in Circana’s data. Some publishers, including Nintendo and Take-Two, do not share certain digital data for this report.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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