Ubisoft Returning To Day-One Steam Releases With Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Today, Ubisoft announced that the recently delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be arriving on Steam on day one when it finally launches in February 2025 and confirmed that future Ubisoft games will do the same, ending a years-long strategy of keeping its biggest games off Steam for months or longer after launch.

Ubisoft never formally laid out a plan to delay every game it published from releasing on Steam, the most popular PC storefront. But in 2019 the publisher called Steam’s model “unrealistic” and chose not to launch The Division 2 on Valve’s service. Since then most Ubisoft games have skipped Steam, but in recent years, Ubisoft has started to publish its games on the platform. And in July 2024, just six months after its launch, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora arrived on Steam. This seemed to signal that the Assassin’s Creed publisher was starting to move away from its previous strategy. And now, it’s official: Ubisoft games will launch on Steam once more.

On September 25, Ubisoft put out a press release announcing the big news that Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which was originally set to arrive in November, has been delayed until February 14, 2025. And as part of that announcement, Ubisoft confirmed that Shadows will launch on Steam for everyone on that date. Yes, that also means Ubisoft is ditching the paid early access crap, too.

BREAKING: AC Shadows has been delayed until February 14 as Ubisoft holds an emergency investor call today following poor recent performance and a tumbling stock price.

Full statement: pic.twitter.com/s61XDUw4mx

— AmericanTruckSongs9 (@ethangach) September 25, 2024

Ubisoft also confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will “mark the return of our new releases on Steam Day 1″ and revealed that Star Wars: Outlaws will be released on Steam on November 21.

However, don’t assume this also means that the dreaded Ubisoft Connect PC launcher will go away soon. While other publishers have started to ditch their horrible PC launchers, I’m not sure Ubisoft is doing that. The last time Ubisoft brought an Assassin’s Creed game to Steam, it confirmed that players would still need to install Connect and set up a Ubisoft account to play AC Valhalla. 

Kotaku has reached out to Ubisoft to confirm if that’s the case this time around. My guess is that, yeah, future Ubisoft games will arrive on Steam day one, but you’ll still need to Ubisoft Connect to play them.

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