I am on Xbox and never got an email from Ubisoft. I was, I'm pretty sure, able to already pre-load the game on Monday. I do not allow automatic updates and check for updates to manually install on a pretty regular basis. On Monday I had an update for Valhalla. The update was roughly 44 GB. My assumption is that this was a preload of the game due to the size of it. I also have a version number of 1.0.1.37. And, I received the all important message that the game was ready to start during the update. Though selecting the option to play only leads to a message from Xbox stating the game is not yet available and to check the store.