Ubisoft Pulls Support for Steam

November 7, 2014

In a somewhat surprising development, Ubisoft have today pulled their three major holiday releases from PC digitial distribution platform Steam, and have raised further questions about their continued support on the platform.

The news initially came from PCGamersN, whom reported that UK Steam users weren’t able to purchase or even see Assassins Creed Unity, Far Cry 4 or The Crew on their store. When prompted for comment, an Ubisoft representative commented: “We’ve been in discussions with Valve about Assassin’s Creed Unity but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK…In the meantime, UK customers wishing to purchase the game digitally can do so by visiting the Uplay store, our retail partners or other digital distributors.” Since then, all three games have since been pulled from all worldwide Steam stores – the only way to purchase these three games by using uPlay (which is a requirement for all but two post-Assassins Creed II Ubisoft PC releases), or by purchasing a key through sites like GreenManGaming, which will shoot you a uPlay key.

It’s not the first time a major third party publisher has pulled support for Steam. Shortly after launching it’s Origin digital distribution service in 2011, EA pulled all future games from Steam; with customer complaints forcing EA to put Crysis 2 (which it initially pulled to make an Origin exclusive) back onto Steam.

New Game Plus has reached out to Ubisoft for comment, and we’ll update the story once we hear back.

UPDATE: Since this story has been posted, Ubisoft has put Assassins Creed Unity, Far Cry 4 and The Crew back onto Steam.