Ubisoft comes crawlin' back to Steam

Ubisoft's dalliance with the Epic Games Store is over. After several years of releasing its new games on Epic's storefront—and not Valve's—the company says it will resume putting new releases on Steam, beginning with Assassin's Creed Shadows in 2025.

Ubisoft said in today's Assassin's Creed Shadows delay announcement that it will be available on Steam when it arrives on February 14, 2025; further, it added, "The game will mark the return of our new releases on Steam Day 1." Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said the same thing in a subsequent trading update call with analysts.

A Ubisoft representative later confirmed with PC Gamer that the company does indeed intend to bring all future new releases to Steam on launch day, simultaneously with other online storefronts.

It's quite a turnaround for Ubisoft, which released The Division 2 as an Epic Games Store exclusive in 2019 and was happy enough with the results that it extended the partnership between the two almost immediately thereafter. In August that same year, Ubisoft senior vice president for partnerships and revenue Chris Early criticized Steam's business model, and more specifically the 30% cut of all sales it takes, as "unrealistic." Epic, by comparison, takes just 12%.

But cracks in the exclusivity wall began to appear in late 2022, with the discovery of backend data indicating that some Ubisoft games were headed back to Steam. Just a few days later, Assassin's Creed Valhalla made the move, two years after its original release; four more, including Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Extraction,  were announced to follow in April 2023.

Those games had already been released on other storefronts prior to their Steam launches, though, and new games continued to avoid Steam—including, until today, Assassin's Creed Shadows, which was slated only for Epic and the Ubisoft Store. But Ubisoft has been struggling in recent years, most recently (and notably) with Star Wars Outlaws, which Ubisoft confirmed today had "softer than expected" sales.

That helped prompt Ubisoft to slam the release-it-on-Steam button earlier than it has in the past—Outlaws is set to arrive on Steam on November 21—and no doubt pushed the broader return to Steam in 2025 too. Making a great game is obviously a big part of making a hit game (and Ubisoft really needs a big hit right now), but if you're not selling where people are buying, you're going to suffer for it. Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin' back.