According to the information, provided by Ukie, on the top selling games in the UK from last week Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate has had the second lowest launch week sales in the entire series. You should be bear in mind that this is only counting physical copies of the game sold, and also only counting the mainline Assassin’s Creed games, which include: AC, AC 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, AC 3, Black Flag, Rouge, Unity, and of course Syndicate.
The game that Syndicate did manage to outperform was Assassin’s Creed: Rouge, which launched exclusively on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, but was overshadowed by Unity which came out the same day.
This begs the question of why would Syndicate sell less copies at launch than seven older Assassin’s Creed games? Well it probably boils down to three main reasons. Firstly there just wasn’t that much hype, here in the Cabin we all had to sit around and listen to Chris go on about The Killers but there was no chatter on the subject of Syndicate. The second reason might just be a lack of trust, Ubisoft failed to deliver a finished product last year with Unity so why should fans trust them now? Lastly it might just be a case of series fatigue. We’ve had a new Assassin’s Creed game every year since 2009, we even had two last year, so maybe it’s time to give the fans a break.
Another thing you should bear in mind is Syndicate didn’t perform badly in sales, it actually was the UK’s top selling game from last week, it just wasn’t reaching the expected figures for an Assassin’s Creed title. If you’re at all hesitant about buying Syndicate perhaps you should wait for The Games Cabin review, which should be going live soon, although spoiler alert not all writers here in the Cabin agree on it.