Ubisoft Announces A Return to Steam, Starting from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

Ubisoft has announced that it intends to resume publishing some of its titles via the Steam platform. On December 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the major game released by the publisher in the last several years, will become available on the PC marketplace operated by Valve. This event will coincide with the launch of the game’s final content update.

A timetable for the release of further Ubisoft games such as the city-building strategy Anno 1800 and the free-to-play 3v3 sports game Roller Champions has not yet been determined. However, both of these games are planned for release on the platform. The news implies that Ubisoft is the latest publisher to make its return to Steam after branching out on its own or elsewhere, such as the competing Epic Games Store.

We’re constantly evaluating how to bring our games to different audiences wherever they are, while providing a consistent player ecosystem through Ubisoft Connect.”

-Ubisoft Spokesperson via The Verge

Several leaks, including listings for the Steam editions of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Roller Champions found in the source code for Ubisoft’s own Connect launcher and a later listing for the latter, have hinted at such a move.

It’s not a secret, though, that Ubisoft removed games from Steam to make them unique to the Epic Games Store, which is known for paying game publishers millions of dollars to lure their titles to that competing platform. Epic Games spent $146 million to make 2K Games’ Borderlands 3 exclusive to that platform, and records from the Epic Games Apple trial reveal that Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs: Legion was identified as a must-have exclusive at the time it was spending that much money.

It seems that Ubisoft eventually reconsidered how feasible its economic strategy is in light of Steam’s enormous user base. There is currently about three years’ worth of Ubisoft games that have not made it to Steam; hopefully, this number increases.