Assassin's Creed Odyssey has seen daily active users rise roughly 90% across Steam, PlayStation and Xbox since Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey opened on July 17, according to analyst figures reported by GamesIndustry.biz and Polygon.
Market analysis firm Aliena Analytics put daily active users at 122,000 on the day the film opened, rising to 233,000 within ten days, about 1.8 times the level recorded before the premiere. Separate figures from Video Game Insights tracked a rise from more than 150,000 on the premiere date to 238,000 by July 26.
Where the players came from
The largest share was on Xbox, where daily active users climbed 134% from 36,000 to 84,000. PlayStation numbers almost doubled to 114,000, while Steam grew 26%. Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Aliena Analytics, attributed the console spikes to subscription services: the 2018 game is included with both Game Pass and PlayStation Plus.
The film didn't make millions buy an eight-year-old game, but it got a massive cohort playing it again. That data gives Ubisoft great ammunition for an eventual AC Odyssey Resynced.
Copy sales moved far less. Elliott said software sales stood at around 400,000 units year-to-date, framing the change as an engagement story rather than a commercial one. GamesIndustry.biz reported that Ubisoft did little to promote the connection beyond a handful of social media posts linking the game and the film.
Polygon pointed to several factors that made the game an easy destination for filmgoers: it recreates Grecian regions and locations from the poem, including the palace of Odysseus, and its 2019 expansion Lost Tales From Greece adds further material drawn from the source. The game is also frequently discounted, is available through PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium, and runs to roughly 100 hours for a basic playthrough.
The pattern has precedent. GamesIndustry.biz reported that daily active users for Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 rose 225% in the weeks after the first season of the Prime television adaptation, and that Video Game Insights recorded further spikes for Fallout: New Vegas and growth for Fallout 4 after the second season, with Steam concurrents doubling from an average of 20,000 to more than 40,000.
Polygon noted that Assassin's Creed Odyssey has had no major update in five years and no native release on Nintendo platforms, and that the resurgence has prompted speculation about whether Ubisoft will revisit the game. Ubisoft has not announced any such plans.
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