Key Highlights:
- Assassin’s Creed III passed seven million sales worldwide just over a month after its October 2012 launch.
- The milestone made Assassin’s Creed III the fastest-selling game in Ubisoft’s history at the time.
- Players recorded three billion single-player assassinations, while multiplayer participation doubled over Revelations.
Assassin’s Creed III passed seven million copies sold worldwide in December 2012, becoming the fastest-selling game in Ubisoft’s history at the time.
Ubisoft announced the milestone on 12 December, just over a month after the game initially launched for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The publisher described the figure as worldwide sell-through, meaning more than seven million copies had been sold to consumers rather than simply shipped to retailers.
The achievement continued an exceptionally strong launch for the fifth mainline Assassin’s Creed game. Ubisoft had already reported approximately 3.5 million sales during its first week, meaning the total had roughly doubled by the time the seven million milestone was announced.
The game also arrived during a major transition for the series. Ezio Auditore’s story had concluded with Assassin’s Creed: Revelations in 2011, while Assassin’s Creed III introduced Ratonhnhaké:ton, better known as Connor, as its new protagonist during the American Revolution.
Ubisoft released several player statistics alongside the sales announcement. More than 82 centuries of gameplay had already been recorded across single-player missions, with players performing over three billion assassinations.
Multiplayer participation had also grown significantly. Ubisoft said more than twice as many players had entered AC III’s multiplayer compared with Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, recording over 250 million assassinations across more than five billion multiplayer sessions.
The seven million figure did not remain the game’s final major sales milestone for long. By February 2013, Ubisoft reported that Assassin’s Creed III had reached approximately 12 million sales worldwide, around 70% higher than Revelations at the equivalent point in its lifecycle.
Its commercial success helped carry the series directly into Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which followed in 2013 and shifted the historical setting to the Golden Age of Piracy. Connor’s grandfather, Edward Kenway, became the new protagonist.
The game later returned as Assassin’s Creed III Remastered in 2019. The remaster brought Connor’s story to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch alongside Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and the Tyranny of King Washington expansions.
Looking back, seven million sales was therefore an early milestone rather than the end of the game’s commercial story. It established Assassin’s Creed III as Ubisoft’s fastest-selling release at the time and demonstrated how much the series had grown within five years of the original AC game launching in 2007.
