Assassin’s Creed Shadows is out in just a few days and Ubisoft has a lot riding on the blockbuster’s launch as it reportedly explores breaking up the company following multiple years of delays, cancellations, and disappointing sales. Complicating matters, the latest installment in the long-running historical stealth series also arrives as one of the primary targets of an “anti-woke” online harassment campaign.
Ever since the French publisher revealed that an African samurai named Yasuke would be one of Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ dual protagonists, a small but deranged contingent of online gamers have made the sequel a target of their reactionary ire. The group has been fueled by rage-bait accounts like Mark “Grummz” Kern and even Elon Musk, who responded to a tweet about the game last year with “DEI kills art.”
“That tweet generated emotions, that…the first thing I wanted to do was go back on X—that I had deleted—and just tweet back,” franchise executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté told Game File last year. “And I just took a step back. I have a mindfulness app on my phone. And I did a bit of mindfulness to try to explore the emotions that this tweet created. For me, Elon, it’s sad, he’s just feeding hatred. I had a lot of three-word replies that came to mind.”
French news network BFM TV now reports that developers at Ubisoft Quebec who worked on the game have been “advised” not to post about it on social media to avoid becoming targets of the harassment campaign. As translated by Google, one anonymous employee commented, “There’s a team that monitors networks and acts quickly in the event of a targeted attack,” going on to say that Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and other mentions of the game are monitored for potential abuse. “Unlike what we’ve had before, this is serious.”
Ubisoft did not directly confirm or deny the reporting when asked about the situation. “Our stance has always been that team members’ social media channels are their own,” a spokesperson for the publisher told Kotaku in an email. “Our top priority is the safety of our employees, including online, which is why, as a standard practice across Ubisoft, we offer guidance on navigating social media, digital safety, and support for team members’ well-being. We also share resources to help prevent and protect against online harassment, something our teams have unfortunately faced.”
Ubisoft has taken varying approaches to the culture war noise around Assassin’s Creed Shadows over the last nine months as its impending release has become more and more of an apparent make-or-break moment for the company. Last June, CEO Yves Guillemot condemned attacks targeting his staff “in the strongest possible terms” and called on others in the industry to do so as well. After the weak launch of Star Wars Outlaws, however, the executive spoke more vaguely about “tackling the dynamics behind the polarized comments around Ubisoft so as to protect the Group’s reputation and maximize our game’s sales potential.”
A recent clapback by the official Assassin’s Creed X account stood out all the more in that context. Kern shared and quoted a post from the account earlier this month, calling on players to boycott Shadows and dunking on the post for having comments turned off, saying, in part, “We get Ubisoft to change, the other top publishers will notice!” When the Shadows X account took the unusual step of responding, Kern’s original post was quickly ratio’d. “Thank you for considering us a top publisher!” The Assassins Creed Shadows social team replied. “While our media ads typically don’t allow comments, our regular posts do.” It was a nice reminder that lots of other people are fed up with “anti-woke” grifters, too.
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