Ubisoft Removes Upcoming PC Games From Steam [UPDATED]

Not buying? Pirating games?

I guess that's the proper reaction to this piece of news.

Boy, I can't wait to play their shitty PC ports on their sub-par service!

Was not gonna grab Assassin's and seems I won't be grabbin Farcry either now. Oh well, not like there aren't plenty of other games to get this time of year.

Probably for the best, considering all the nonsense coming outta Ubi mouths these days.

Stupid Ubisoft. That is what happens when you threaten the life of STEAM. I think. Anyway, Ubi lost me as a customer since I am mostly a PC gamer and I hate having to log in into a ton of apps to play my games.

This hurts PC gaming in general. Not a fan of Uplay or Origin? Just by it on console.

Well. Now I have a reason to go buy retail for the extra savings!

You're not a fan of the service with the most convenience, largest varied selection, best prices and active community?

What ARE you a fan of then? Sentient potatoes hocking burned-disk games from a kiosk at the mall? XD

I really hate having to use their service, origin too. I've got my friendslist on steam and most of my games through its library. What do they gain from this? They don't release enough games for anyone to use their service long term and I don't think people generally play AC/FC long enough for there to be any chance of people permanently switching their distributor.

This is just because steam takes a little bit of money off the top right?

well... FUCK THIS

Ubisoft, fix your broken account system that uses account email address as the username and then I'll fucking CONSIDER using your broke-ass service.

Well... I wasn't going to buy their piece of shit ports anyways. So long, Ubisoft! You'll not be missed.

Was playing Far Cry 3. Uplay was taking 130,000 fucking megs of memory in the background. So I turned it off. Guess what? Fuck you, now your saves don't work!

So I pirated it and enjoyed a good 10fps increase and a much faster-booting game. Obtrusive DRM. It can go fuck itself.

Well this is a bummer. Today I used my Best Buy points earned from purchases in their store to buy a Steam card for credit in the Steam store. I used the card to credit my Steam account with the intent of pre-ordering Far Cry 4. This was all before I discovered the game wasn't on Steam anymore and I came here to make a thread about it. I wonder if Ubisoft will honor the pre-orders they've already received through Steam?

Edit: So any thoughts on what should I buy with my Steam credit?

So I'll probably be playing Ubisoft games on the PS4 in the future. Good to know.

well out of necessity we're sort of forced to use it, but there is potentially a lot of things they can do to improve their experience. unfortunately they don't really have to.

i probably wouldn't have a problem with this if Ubi made a bigger push to make Uplay a standalone service, and invest in improving its usability and performance, and maybe didn't entirely do this out of the blue. yeah there's a lot that could have gone better, but using a service other than Steam is not something i'm inherently opposed to.

Wait for sale, kill it with money.

@bonorbitz: Just buy Humble Indie Bundle 13 with great titles like Jazzpunk, Eldritch and Shadowgun Returns and many more. Save that money for the next steam sale. This proliferation of broken, publisher specific platforms made me even boycot Origin and Uplay despite countless free game giveaways. I always predicted this to happen. Uplay and origin should whimper away like GFWL.

@bonorbitz:

Steam will almost certainly still honor pre-orders. At worst, people will either receive refunds or codes to use on uPlay. Games that have been pulled from Steam are still downloadable if you have them on your account. Get Binding of Isaac: Rebirth or wait for the major summer sale, which should start sometime next month. You could probably pick up quite a few games during that time.

Wonder if this will cause Ubisoft to make their service better to encourage people to come. As much hatred as everyone seems to enjoy piling on EA, there is no denying that they haven't half-assed Origin, with great service, nice deals (especially on EA games, obviously) and straight up free games being offered. If Origin is what it takes for EA to still see a market in PC gaming, I am totally cool with that. uPlay is kind of bad though, with the only defining feature being that uPlay point stuff, which is interesting in theory.

No no no nononnonononononoonnoooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

Want to force publishers like EA and Ubisoft to get with the program and put their catalogs back on Steam? Then stop buying games on Uplay and Origin!

I should note that the games in the Origin store cost the same as their console equivalents. Before you could get the PC releases cheaper than their console counterparts on account of reduced costs. Here, we have the company not paying royalties, not requiring pressing of discs, not paying stocking fees and not requiring retailer discounts and yet they pretend to offer good service and cheap prices...

Ubi spends so much time and money trying to build good will, so why do they continue to throw that away doubling down on something people hate and find no value in?

Plus the entire U Play experience is shit. A game like AC or Far Cry should be able to be launched with a controller without having to click around on a mouse. I spend a lot of time playing games like that on my TV in big picture mode. Are Uni paying any attention to the direction things are going?

Well, for the longest time now youd have to run Ubi games through UPlay even if you launch them from Steam, so in a way how much does this really change things?

One less DRM to run on the background when you play future Ubi games is all this is.

Well, guess I'm not getting FC4 since it won't work at launch and it won't be on sale. Shame, was pretty excited about more Far Cry.

130,000 MB of memory is also known as 130GB of memory. Which is a fucking lot. You may or may not have a few too many zeros there, or the wrong unit.

I do not like having to launch a different service for anything. And not having internet and trying to play Far Cry 3 was an interesting experience.

Can you buy all of Valve's games outside of steam? I never even wondered. Most of them for sure. As for these shenanigans it's too late for me anyways, I got uplayed ages ago and same with origin so welcome to the club I guess. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

oh well, the uplay thing is already on my computer anyway. unlike ea, i actually like a lot of ubi's games.

fuck this, fuck ubisoft and EA why must you split up my library. Small complaint maybe. but this is bullshit. strait bullshit

Steam, Origin, Uplay, Desura, Battle.net WHO ELSE!? what other clients are required for me to enjoy your fucking product. #letmevent

Uplay gets hacked every other months or so.

@geraltitude: You can buy 'em outside of Steam, but not play them. Most storefronts provide a Steam key. All their Source games are deeply integrated with Steam.

If you want, you can buy disc versions of the old GoldSrc games (Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic), but they'll all be pre-1.6, before all their engine optimizations and texture filtering.

Yeah, I'll just play Ubi games on console and pretty much bypass having to deal with UPlay at all.

Wow... and here I was looking forward to buying the game the game a few days after launch (I never buy games on launch, especially PC games). It is sad when you look at Ubisoft titles and see that the pirate versions are actually superior to the legal versions. No Uplay restrictions, no internet connection required, no lost save games, you can install a pirate version on multiple computers and transfer y our saves across systems (stupid that Ubisoft ties your save to a hardware ID). It is like Ubisoft is trying their best to torpedo their PC business.

Uplay doesn't even auto update. I played blacklist because I got a code with my graphics card, and made me never want to play it again. The steam games I have all have like 500 hours played because the stupid uplay window stays up after exiting the game. Not to mention just forcing steam users to go through another launcher to play their damn games. I dislike origin and hate uplay, but uplay makes origin look like steam.

Wait do we actually know that I was Ubisoft who removed their games off Steam? Or did Steam kick them off?

If memory serves Steam actually kicked EA off for not agreeing completely to their terms...

I'm no fan of Uplay or Origin, but I didn't see why doing this now benefits Ubisoft. If they truly have some beef with Steam , I think they would have pulled the games a long time ago then risk this kind of reaction and negative PR right befor their big IPs are about to release. And probably gotten these games on other alternative sources like Origin. They have a lot more at stake here than Steam

This sounds more like something to me where Valve scores PR points by being a hard ass with their pricing policy because they know people will reflexively blame Ubisoft.

e.g.

• Valve: Ass Creed needs to be discountable for our Xmas sale. All our internal analytic show that you actually make more money if you put your products on frequent steep sales What you lose in margin you more than makeup up in Volume. We think you need to do this. If you make more money than we make more money
• Ubisoft: We think our cinematic game is a premium experience worth at least X dollars and will not allow that perception to be cheapened by an immediate sale. We think immediate markdowns trains our customers to wait for lower prices, which slows our cash flow, hurts our pre-order sales, lowers our day 1 sales and hurts our long term value of our IP.
• Valve: Agree to have FC4 and Ass Creed eligible for Xmas discounting or we can't have them on our service.
• Ubisoft: We're afraid we can't do that
• Valve: Well then we're afraid that we can't have your games on our platform
• Ubisoft: That's alright we have our own equivalent digital distribution platform, we don't need you GabeN
• Valve: <snicker>

@tamriilin said:

But people will, and you know it. We went through all this with Origin years ago. The "let's try and see this from Ubisoft's point of view, guys" set are already out in force. People generally aren't going to forgo playing a game they want to play, no matter what a publisher might do to shit on them. MW2boycott.jpg goes here.

I guess I'm fortunate in that I don't care about either EA's or Ubisoft's games, so I don't have to bend over for them. Still haven't installed Origin or Uplay. Doubt I ever will.

Well I got Far Cry 4 free through that NVidia deal, so I guess I'll deal with it.

Oh well the Green Man Gaming deals on Ubi games are mostly on UPlay anyway so I think it'll be fine.

I can see how large publishers like Ubisoft have developed their own online platforms and don't necessarily *need* to distribute on Steam but... don't know- it seems like as Patrick says at the end here that the consumer isn't necessarily the one to benefit. I also don't see Ubisoft benefiting either unless there is a conflict of interest here that I'm just not seeing. I'm not huge on PC gaming although I have a pretty nice gaming rig now and have been playing more and more on it (like Dark Souls II which technically is superior to the console versions on a decent gaming PC). Steam is really all I need and don't feel a need to get uPlay or Origin accounts going on top of that. For new games if it doesn't hit steam I'll just pick up the console versions and probably be totally happy with them. For instance I think Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare looks amazing on Xbox One and I think as we finally cut free of the older hardware (360 and PS3) the games will continue to improve technically on these new consoles. We'll see how this pans out but my gut reaction is that it might hurt sales to pull out of steam.

I won't buy them for the PC if they are not on Steam, plain and simple. I really only buy PC games for/from Steam and GOG.com and really don't want my purchases spread out over a bunch of different services. I like to easily be able to get as many of my games as possible from one location and not have to try and figure out where I purchased something down the line when I want to play it again.

Uplay is required to play their games even if you bought them from Steam anyway. So cutting out the middleman makes perfect sense. Valve absolutely fucking fleeces publishers and indie developers with a 30% cut off the top of every sale. Fuck that. If I was running Ubi I would tell them to eat a dick too.

Not that I am defending Uplay which is 100% hot garbage that Ubisoft should be apologizing to me personally for every day it exists.

While I think this is dumb and think uPlay is a piece of garbage (seriously, go look up what it was like for a large number of Splinter Cell: Blacklist users), this changes very little. When you bought a Ubisoft game on PC, it just downloaded the content and ran uPlay anyway. It had no Steamworks integration and aside from having Steam Overlay (which you can manually add in anyway), you were buying a uPlay title, you just launched it from Steam instead. I don't like this move but it changes basically nothing from what people were already doing.

Yeah, jeez. My new job is draining me of thinking juice. 1,300 MB is probably what it was.

NOPE.

Well, so much for playing Unity and Far Cry 4. Thanks for saving me $120 bucks, Ubisoft!

Their games required uPlay already. The only difference now is that I won't notice when the game is released, because I don't willingly log into the service unless I'm playing one of their games. On Steam, I log on just to check on friends. Not being on the news page for Steam is going to really suck for AC:U.

No thank you. I'll be fine just getting it on my ps4. (mostly because I need games for my ps4).

@jaks: It should be noted that valve provides all sorts of infrastructure around games on their service. And people consider steam a liked and trustworthy place to buy games. The same cannot be said about Uplay, people disliked it before they sold games and they dislike it now.

Steam has generally accomplished what GFWL was attempting (but miserably failing) and these extra services just fracture the community. Some services are as well liked as Steam (such as GOG) because they too appear to treat their customers well and provide something different (that is desirable). Uplay does none of that and is run by a company that isn't trusted to ever do the right thing in the PC space (and at times neither in the console space).

If they had any confidence in their services they would let their products remain on Steam and simply offer better incentives to buy directly from them (such as what CD Projekt is doing with the Witcher3).

If its not on steam, gog, or drm free I won't buy it. No thanks to Origin and HELL NO to uplay. Guess I won't be playing your new games Ubisoft. Good riddance.