Ubisoft’s dalliance with the Epic Video games Retailer is over. After a number of years of releasing its new video games on Epic’s storefront—and never Valve’s—the corporate says it should resume placing new releases on Steam, starting with Murderer’s Creed Shadows in 2025.
Ubisoft stated in at the moment’s Murderer’s Creed Shadows delay announcement that it will likely be obtainable on Steam when it arrives on February 14, 2025; additional, it added, “The sport will mark the return of our new releases on Steam Day 1.” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated the identical factor in a subsequent buying and selling replace name with analysts.
A Ubisoft consultant later confirmed with PC Gamer that the corporate does certainly intend to deliver all future new releases to Steam on launch day, concurrently with different on-line storefronts.
It is fairly a turnaround for Ubisoft, which launched The Division 2 as an Epic Video games Retailer unique in 2019 and was joyful sufficient with the outcomes that it prolonged the partnership between the 2 nearly instantly thereafter. In August that very same yr, Ubisoft senior vice chairman for partnerships and income Chris Early criticized Steam’s enterprise mannequin, and extra particularly the 30% minimize of all gross sales it takes, as “unrealistic.” Epic, by comparability, takes simply 12%.
However cracks within the exclusivity wall started to appear in late 2022, with the invention of backend information indicating that some Ubisoft video games had been headed again to Steam. Just some days later, Murderer’s Creed Valhalla made the transfer, two years after its unique launch; 4 extra, together with Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Extraction, had been introduced to comply with in April 2023.
These video games had already been launched on different storefronts previous to their Steam launches, although, and new video games continued to keep away from Steam—together with, till at the moment, Murderer’s Creed Shadows, which was slated just for Epic and the Ubisoft Retailer. However Ubisoft has been struggling lately, most lately (and notably) with Star Wars Outlaws, which Ubisoft confirmed at the moment had “softer than anticipated” gross sales.
That helped immediate Ubisoft to slam the release-it-on-Steam button sooner than it has up to now—Outlaws is about to reach on Steam on November 21—and little doubt pushed the broader return to Steam in 2025 too. Making an incredible sport is clearly an enormous a part of making a success sport (and Ubisoft actually wants an enormous hit proper now), however should you’re not promoting the place individuals are shopping for, you are going to endure for it. Regardless of the most effective efforts of main publishers together with Activision, Digital Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, to not point out the much better deal supplied to builders by Epic, Steam is extra dominant than ever—and ultimately, all of them got here crawlin’ again.
