Good news right now is like diamond-encrusted hen’s teeth, so I’ll grab hold of any I can find with both hands, even if I can’t quite authenticate it yet. And what good news it is if true: Ubisoft is apparently finally stepping back from its idiotic insistence that Steam customers launch its god-awful Connect client every time they want to play one of its games. According to a screenshot of a post from Steam, starting with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Ubisoft is introducing a new test that’ll allow all the “advantages” of Connect to work without needing to have the Assassin’s Creed publisher’s bloatware store installed.
Ubisoft has been pushing Connect (once called Ubisoft Game Launcher, and later Uplay) on a resistant audience since 2009 as part of its insistence on trying to establish its own digital platform on PC, complete with DLCs, achievements, and indeed DRM. The problem was (and still is) that it’s a rare soul who considers themselves an exclusively “Ubisoft gamer,” wholly dedicated only to the output of one specific company. If anything, 99 percent of people never even notice which publisher made any given game unless forced to. So Connect, unable to be a launcher for the rest of a gaming library, could only ever be a frustrating extra step in launching anything.
It seems that this tiresome tyranny might finally be over, if Ubisoft’s pledge to integrate the features it insists on (“cross-progression, cross-play, player safety, challenges and rewards”) into Steam proves true. According to the statement, seemingly posted to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown customers, Ubisoft is “testing a new Ubisoft Connect Services Steam tool that keeps Ubisoft game features…without requiring the Ubisoft Connect PC launcher to be installed or launched.”
Ubisoft calls this “an initial step toward a smoother and more streamlined launch experience on Steam,” rolling it out to more games as it “progressively evolves.”
OK, so the reason for all the hesitation at the start is that every site that’s reporting this story at the moment is basing it on a single screenshot posted to Reddit, apparently without verifying it for themselves.
And while that screenshot looks very legit, it’s pretty peculiar that no one else seems to be able to locate the source. Except, I’ve come very close. If you search Steam’s news feed for “ubisoft,” you get a result posted September 8 that contains a snippet of the text in the image, suggesting this is likely for real.
However, click on any of the links in the result and you arrive at an error page. Which is odd. We’ve contacted Ubisoft, and have been promised a response regarding this soon.
If true, then what wonderful news. All of these publisher-specific launchers have been a bane since they became all the rage in the 2010s. EA tried it with the awful Origin, now replaced by the enigmatically named EA App, and in an attempt to thwart the core issue, at one point opened it up to be able to launch the games of rivals. However, it was utterly dreadful so no one did. And of course Rockstar and Blizzard have insisted on their own tiresome software in attempts to control player behavior and push upselling. Ubisoft stepping back would be really splendid.
There’s the obvious response of, “But surely this is just giving Valve even more ubiquity over a market it already monopolizes?” and well, not really. This is exclusively affecting those who bought Ubisoft games via Steam in the first place, and then are forced to run a second launcher for no useful reason. Hardcore Connect devotees can continue to buy their games that way should they wish. While it would be very good to see a feasible rival rise against Steam, this isn’t that.
We’ll update once we get some official confirmation.
