Ubisoft has always seemed to distrust money from PC sales. I think they firmly believed that every pirated copy was a lost sale, and for a long time they'd rather lose sales from horrible DRM and shoddy ports than 'lose sales due to piracy.'

Now they're probably using similar logic in regards to Steam.

They were JK.

God forbid you should launch a different executable before your game boots up. Those greedy fucks, trying to promote their own platform, how unethical. The funniest thing, apart from people losing their minds over nothing, is that everyone who is buying these games on consoles couldn't couldn't less.

According to earlier user-comments the pre-order availability of Ubisoft games on Steam has been wonky before in the UK, could also be that's it's been wonky in pretty much every territory.
Ubisoft already commented on this whole occurrence to PCGamesN, by saying this is the case for "for the time being". That's what patrick wrote this piece about, which also includes HIS speculation that Ubisoft games might never ever be available on Steam in the future.

For all purpose and effect patrick asked Ubisoft for a statement on his overblown interpretation of their earlier statement, is that really how journalism works?
And i still think you are angry over pretty much nothing, nobody is being forced to pay insane prices on Uplay.
Currently you can preorder AC:Unity for like 24€ and FC4 for like 30€, just remember that you don't have to preorder trough Uplay OR Steam
There are other place on the internet to buy "games" on, after all the only thing you actually need is a key.
Digital distribution still offers the joys of looking for deals, just like buying games at retail, most people just don't know/care because they got this perverse "Steam convenience"syndrome.

Steam also started out as "just an DRM system for control", it needed time and most importantly an community, to get where it's at today.
Without an community supporting any of the "innovations" that Origin and Uplay offer it's gonna be pretty hard for them to "outinnovate" Steam, they first have to get at least competitive.
And they are trying different stuff, like i explained before: EA giving out free copies of Battlefield 3 (and many other games) on Origin has actually been a pretty good deal
Uplay offers an actual reward structure behind it's achievements, by giving out in-game items for achievement points, something i doubt will every be possible on Steam.

Steam will be a mainstay for the foreseeable future just alone because of the "headstart" it had, it basically invented the whole sector of "digital distribution", when nobody thought this ever possible. But both Origin and Uplay have come a long way since their original releases, and they will keep on improving. Blizzards Battle.net is also out there, hardly noticed because it mostly "works", while not really "innovating" that much.

Btw: If Valve would actually be listening to it's customers, then we'd all be playing Half Life 3 by now ;)

@humanity said:

Am buying Unity on console. Can confirm.

The last time this happened (with EA), wasn't the reason because Valve refused to carry the app if the DLC was not also distributed through Steam?

For those in the UK who still currently don't have access to purchase those games on Steam, it means having to pay more than they would otherwise. They also lose all the conveniences of Steam and receive all the inconveniences of Uplay, which is a terrible, terrible platform. So, yes. UK gamers lose money by paying more than they were going to, and they are inconvenienced by being forced to play their games on a worse platform that offers no benefit to them.

And yes, I am aware that even if you purchase Ubisoft games on Steam, you still have to run a bullshit middle-man version of Uplay, but at least you're still in the Steam ecosystem. It's in my game library. My friends can see what I'm playing. There's a dedicated hub and forum for the game with a huge amount of players contributing cool stuff, tips, and discussion. I can count on the game not crashing every other hour. All that is lost when you have to use Uplay.

This is totally about consumer advocacy. When you remove a choice for consumers, you take away their power. What Ubisoft is doing is taking away the consumers' power to buy their games on Steam while also not giving them something way better than that in return.

Oh, there is a big, BIG difference between steam.exe and Uplay.exe. steam.exe leads to a program that over the past 11 years has built up a solid reputation as the industry standard for digital distribution, and it's one that consumers generally like. Uplay.exe leads to a program that is busted, backwards, and draconian, one that has to force itself into a middle-man position to survive. Uplay has been in existence for 5 years, and it's still garbage. Put the two to the test, and Steam ends up being vastly more competitive to Uplay. But this isn't even the point.

It's not unethical to promote your platform. I'm not against Ubisoft making money. If they can make money and make consumers happy at the same time, then that's great! That's capitalism working. But, what they're doing to promote their platform and make money this time is by taking away the consumers' choice to buy their games on Steam instead of Uplay. With the general consensus on Uplay being that it's total shit, that's a bad thing to do. Using your power to take away consumer choice in order to make more money for yourself is unethical.

Let's imagine that Coca Cola decided to say "Fuck you, grocery stores. I'm going to open my own franchise of stores that will be the only place where you can buy Coca Cola products, and I'm going to charge premium prices on these products so that I can make more money. Also, these stores are going to be the worst absolute shopping experience possible because we can still make money doing it anyway" Ignoring the fact that that would be the stupidest, most suicidal thing Coca Cola could do to run itself out of business, no sane consumer is going to buy into that. They'd have to inconvenience themselves to drive to a special and inferior store to buy certain products at higher prices than before. That's analogous to the current situation of gamers in the UK in regards to Uplay, and that's fucked up.

As far as consoles go, that's a completely different discussion. Of course console gamers aren't directly affected, but that shouldn't invalidate the arguments of those angry at what Ubisoft is doing to PC gamers. In short, that's not funny.

Ubisoft's PC support has been very bad for a long while (remember, their Chief Executive said 95% of PC players were pirates). I'm not surprised they might be following in EA's footsteps and forcing people onto their little bit of software and off Steam. Nonetheless, it is irritating for the consumer who wants to have all their games in one place. Steam's authority must be challenged of course, but only through games sales, and Green Man Gaming and Humble Bundle do this very well. Uplay and Origin will always be surplus to requirements.

@nethlem:

In regard to your point about building a community, I agree that having a supporting community behind Uplay and Origin would improve these systems in time. But Uplay and, by extension, Ubisoft can’t expect to build a community when they ship such poor quality PC ports to the consumer, and then labour them with cripplingly unreliable DRM. After spending money on games that are either poorly implemented on the PC or are partially or fully inaccessible due to online DRM most players are left feeling undervalued and taken advantage of, you can’t build a community on that.

As for the peripheral benefits of both Uplay and Origin, while they are admirable and interesting, the fundamental function of these systems must be to enable the player to play their games, but often the online/ server dimension of these systems acts as an impediment to that. The first question that most players have when they use these systems is “will it work today?”, and even if it does there’s no guarantee it will work tomorrow. Ultimately, if the player does not have unfettered access to their games then it really doesn’t matter what else the service is offering, there’s no point in having a top spec Ferrari if it doesn’t have any wheels.

I assure you that I am no Steam fan boy, Steam does have its problems (see Dark Void DRM on Steam), and as basic and often times underwhelming as the Steam system can be, it does work.

BTW, if Ubisoft or EA bought the rights to and produced Half Life 3, it would be a nightmare, but I would still play that game till my PC caught fire :)

(But would you want Half Life 3 in their hands?)

@gruebacca: It's simple business and they aren't taking away your ability to play the game. All PC users will still be able to enjoy AC Unity or whichever Ubisoft title they choose to purchase. You might say Sony or Microsoft are much more "unethical" in this case as they buy out/negotiate exclusive rights to games. In that scenario you literally have a company leveraging it's power (i.e. money) over a developer and completely taking away any sort of consumer choice regarding which platform you play the game on. If you own an XB1 then it's pretty gross that Sony has taken away your ability to play Bloodborne in order to make more money from the exclusivity. A whole lot of people that don't have the extra income to purchase both platforms are being quite literally locked out from the game forever. In comparison what Ubisoft was doing was quite tame as they were simply asking you to start up their launcher before you play the game and thats it, you can still play it. As for the overwhelming 'consensus' about Uplay being complete shit I will chalk that up to internet hyperbole. It's a functioning system. It may not be as robust as it's competition which had a 10 year head start but it gets the job done. I'm sure many people have mentioned this time and time again about what a completely broken piece of shit Steam was for quite literally the first few years of it's existence, but I think you really had to live through that to appreciate the sentiment. Uplay is a masterpiece of engineering compared to what Steam was. The friends list was non-functioning for what feels like a year, and that was only one of the smaller problems it had.

well, as I guessed before, Ubisoft moved its stupid decision by itself. by the way, I really hate it because any game isn't activated at all after removing, re-installing for some reason. I tried recent Ubisoft's blockbusters which I purchased all from steam. for some reasons, I removed them. then re-installed. but they were not activated at all. totally shit. I won't ever buy Ubisoft again.

It's not like I was going to buy another Ass Creed game anyway. Go crazy nuts, put it on Desura I don't care.

Saw the game running on Xbox at PAX, boy that framerate looked rough.

Glad to see the games back on Steam and to see that Ubisoft wasn't too proud to admit their mistake.

I totally get why they don't want to pay Valve a fee when they have their own store - but Steam is where the gamers are, so if they want sales it would be dumb not to sell there even if the revenue is lower than in Uplay

If they want Uplay to be a real alternative to Steam they need to make it worth yet another client, library and friends list for the consumers and that won't come easy nor cheap ( as EA have learned with Origin )

It's not like they don't pay Microsoft or Sony for games on their consoles/stores, or Origin for that matter, so... yeah.. get over it Ubisoft or best Steam/Origin by creating a client worth using..

Oh man! Ubisoft the wants to make money and not have to give other services a cut? It's like their a publically traded company with responsibility to increase profits for their share holders or something. Screw them, right?

Which would make sense... if Steam wasn't the marketing leading distributor of digital content by a bajillion miles. It's like proclaming that they will no longer sell their games at gamestop.

reminds me of the From Dust days ahaha

@humanity: Ubisoft has proven time and time again that even the Japanese market cannot compare to their ignorance when it comes to the PC. AC Black Flag for example was poorly opitimized trash,dropping to 20 fps in some areas on my 7950 (all low settings too). Ubisoft DRM is also completely stupid and backwards. Remember when they tried to make AC 3 always online? Hell theres even been a thread on the forums here lately talking about how ridiculous the AC Unity requirements are.

I don't care how bad steam was in the past. If it's as bad as it sounds then I would be just as frustrated with it as I am with uplay, but this isn't steam, this is Ubisoft who most of the PC crowd have absolutely zero respect for because of how consistently bad they've bungled the PC versions of their games.

I'm trying hard to care about Ubisoft and their games... not really.

I do believe Steam should be abandoned and every game should be sold directly by the people who make it because I just don't like middlemen and big centralised superstores.

Steam is full of junk, too. Early Access must die before it kills off any remaining goodness in games.

No damn way I'd buy these shitbox games to begin with, but I sure as shit won't be buying them from Uplay.

Ubisoft, you still don't realize that damn near everyone on the planet hates your digital "service"?

At the moment the uplay store isn't listed on my uplay but instead if I click on 'store' it opens up steam....

I'm scared and confused.

Are they back for you? It looks (from looking at Steam regional price trackers) like there are Russian and European prices back up for things like Far Cry 4. No Sterling prices, because this isn't a short-term issue for the UK: this is our normal.

The story was updated to note they came back a day later for the US but the UK, as I noted being part of a long long history of this precise behaviour, still does not have any of these games available to pre-purchase on the UK Steam store. It's almost as if there's a much bigger story there that no one has reported.

Oh good, they're back.

Looks like Rogue isn't coming to PC though? That's a bummer. It's the one I was looking to pick up.

I don't honestly see why there is such as strong hate for anything not steam. It's good to have competition. Steam today still isn't good with it's constant disconnections from the friends system (which some games required you to be logged into like CSGO.)

In the end steam is the lesser of the evils but this move by ubisoft isn't surprising. I honestly prefer the uplay client to steam (when it works) it takes up about the same cpu/memory foot print as steam and doesn't pop up an ad every time I exit a game. Steam calls their ads "updates" and gets away with being the best platform on the PC but yet everyone I know uses ad block and hates hulu and youtube for ads. Whats the deal with this hypocrisy?

Also what's kind of funny, is that Uplay has strong ties to steam. If you go on the uplay client when steam is open, notice no "shop" button at the top of the screen. Close steam and uplay and just launch uplay, notice the shop button is there. Wonder why? because ubisoft is 100% fine with you buying stuff on steam. It was fine with it. Also if you have steam open and uplay open then right click on the uplay icon and go to shop. It opens steam with the publisher set to "ubisoft"

The idea of multiple equally competitive marketplaces to choose from is a great one. But what you have in these circumstances isn't choice, it's dictation. People simply don't enjoy being told where they MUST buy their product from here on out because the publisher drew a line in the sand. Rather than entice users over by offering a great equal or better service they simply pull the rug out from underneath their customer base. Pulling fast ones like these only serves to alienate people, they will never win the hearts and minds of people using nothing but stick without a hint of delicious carrot.

I bought BF4 on Origin, never again. It shows me the same stupid popup everytime I log in. Once I am done with it (and I think I am), Origin is getting uninstalled.

I will never again buy a PC game from a service that isn't Steam. If it's not on Steam, I simply won't play it. I already have more games than I will ever possibly touch there, so if developers don't want my money that's fine with me.

I don't trust these companies not to turn the games off at some point.

The only exception to this is Mobas and MMOs. They have their own communities and launchers because it makes sense for them to.

all i ever see anyone do on steam forums for ubisoft games is bitch about the drm anyways, so this is progress.

Steam, Battlenet, and Origin all seem pretty solid. I only want to make room for a few clients. Uplay isn't on the list.

EA probably made a deal with Ubi to bring Steam down a notch, however I don't intend on using Uplay. Ubi games still on Origin... I'd rather use Origin than Uplay. This deal doesn't seem to work out too well for Ubi.

@tigerthecat5: right? wtf? Ubisoft and EA really dont have much respect for the PC anymore.