Ten Days After "The Odyssey" Opened, an Eight-Year-Old Game Doubled Its Players — Odysseus Isn't in It — Woody Magazine, Aug. 27, 2026

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Aug. 27, 2026 (Thu.)

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Ten Days After "The Odyssey" Opened, an Eight-Year-Old Game Doubled Its Players — Odysseus Isn't in It

A hit movie sends people back to the source, the saying goes. Half true. What people actually bought this summer was not the closest thing to Homer but the nearest thing to hand.

In three lines

Ten days after Nolan's film opened, daily players of Ubisoft's 2018 "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" went from 122,000 to 233,000.
Odysseus isn't in it, and it sold only 400,000 copies all year. The new players didn't buy it; they opened it inside a subscription.
The book went the same way. The best seller was not a standard translation but the 2017 one already on the front table.

Christopher Nolan turned Homer into a summer blockbuster. "The Odyssey" opened in the United States on July 17 and, six weeks in, has taken roughly $1.45 billion worldwide against a $250 million budget, the biggest gross of Nolan's career. We know what happens next with a hit this size. The book sells. It happened with "Dune" and with the Oppenheimer biography, and it happened here. According to Circana BookScan, which tracks U.S. print sales, sales of "The Odyssey" across all editions are up 76 percent this year.

That is the familiar part. The unfamiliar part is what else moved in those same ten days, and moved harder. It wasn't a book. It was a video game, and the game isn't about Odysseus at all.

Same title, wrong century

Ubisoft, the French publisher behind the "Assassin's Creed" series, released "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" in 2018. It is set in 431 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. You play a Spartan mercenary. The Trojan War that Homer sang about is several centuries earlier, and Odysseus never appears. Beyond the word in the title and a Greek coastline, the game and the film share nothing.

Here is what the games-market research firm Alinea Analytics measured anyway. On July 17, the day the film opened, about 122,000 people played the game across PC and consoles. On July 27, ten days later, 233,000 did. That is 110,000 more players a day, a 90 percent jump, and the busiest the game had been in years.

122,000 → 233,000

Daily players of "Assassin's Creed Odyssey," July 17 and July 27, 2026 (Alinea Analytics estimate)

The tidy explanation is mistaken identity: people walked out of the theater, searched "Odyssey," found a game, and bought it. Fair enough. But the numbers don't cooperate. The game has sold about 400,000 copies this year, a figure Alinea calls "modest." If 110,000 new people a day showed up and sales barely twitched, they didn't buy the game. They either already owned it or could open it without buying it.

Not bought. Opened.

It was the second. The game sits in both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, the monthly subscriptions from Microsoft and Sony that work like Netflix for games: pay the fee, download anything in the catalog. Someone who came home from the movie and switched on a console found a 60-hour tour of ancient Greece already included in a bill they were paying anyway. There was no price to hesitate over, so nobody hesitated.

The split by platform makes that clear. On Xbox, daily players rose 134 percent, from 36,000 to 84,000. On PlayStation they rose 94 percent, to 114,000. On Steam, the PC store where there is no catalog and you have to buy the game outright, they rose 26 percent. Where a payment stood in the doorway, the crowd grew by a quarter. Where the door was already open, it roughly doubled.

When it suddenly rains, umbrellas sell. But the umbrella that sells is not the best-made one. It's the one hanging by the register at the convenience store outside the subway exit. Nolan's film was the rain. Ubisoft's game happened to be hanging by the register, in the subscription catalog. Nobody checked whether Odysseus was in it. We don't check the stitching on an umbrella in a downpour either.

Ubisoft understood this. It timed a social media campaign to the film's release and pushed its "Discovery Tour" back to the front, a combat-free mode that walks you through Greek cities with a guide. It put the umbrella by the door before the moviegoer got there.

The book sold the same umbrella

The book shows the same pattern. There are dozens of English translations of "The Odyssey," including versions by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fagles, long regarded as the standard modern translations. You would expect a hit this big to lift the most authoritative of them. It didn't. The best-selling edition this year is the 2017 translation by Emily Wilson, a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania and the first woman to render the poem in English verse. She matched Homer line for line in plain contemporary English. Her publisher, W. W. Norton, says it has sold more than a million copies in the U.S. this year alone. That is the publisher's own count, but Circana's ranking of editions points the same way.

And that 76 percent figure came out before the film did. Publishers Weekly reported it on July 15, two days ahead of release, as a year-to-date number. Go back further and sales had already risen 42 percent in 2025, the year after Nolan announced the project in December 2024. Norton saw the clouds and put the umbrellas out early. More to the point, it had umbrellas to put out: a nine-year-old translation still stocked like a new release, and an audiobook, read by the actress Claire Danes, already in circulation. On Spotify, listens to the epic rose 680 percent after the film opened.

A hit makes it rain. What sells is decided not by the rain but by the shelf.

We like to say a hit sends people back to the original. It does. But "the original" is not where they land. They land on a specific object: whatever comes up in the search box that night, whatever is in the subscription catalog, whatever is stacked on the table by the bookstore door. Ubisoft's game was on that table without having any claim to Homer. Wilson's translation was on it ahead of older translations with decades more history. Neither got there by predicting the hit. The subscription deal and the publication date were settled years earlier. The rain came later.

So there is one thing worth keeping from all this. When something suddenly catches fire, the beneficiary is not the thing that most resembles it but the thing that is within reach at that moment. Resemblance gets sorted out later. Reach was decided in advance.

Ubisoft did not make much money on this. What a game company earns from a subscription is not what it earns from a sale, and 400,000 copies is still 400,000 copies. What it got instead was a record: 233,000 people a day opening an eight-year-old game, a number Alinea says will be Ubisoft's argument for an eventual remaster. Norton, on the other hand, sold books. In the end, the person who sold umbrellas in the rain was not the person who made the best umbrella. It was the person who had one hanging by the door.

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