Ubisoft has announced its full return to Steam, with all of its new releases scheduled to launch day one on Valve's store, starting with Assassin's Creed Shadows on February 14th next year.
Assassin's Creed: Shadows will be Ubisoft's first game to launch on Steam on day one since Starlink: Battle for Atlas in April 2019. Since then, the publisher has chosen to release its PC titles on its own storefront and the Epic Games Store.
In fact, for a long time, new Ubisoft titles weren't available on Steam, but that changed in December 2022, when Assassin's Creed Valhalla made the jump to Valve's platform, some two years after its initial release. Anno 1800 and Roller Champions followed, and the experiment was seemingly a success; in the years since, most of Ubisoft's new titles have been released on Steam, albeit at least several months behind other digital storefronts.
Now, however, as part of its Assassin's Creed Shadows delay announcement, the publisher has confirmed a shift in strategy for its PC titles, revealing that Shadow's February 14 launch will “mark the return of our new releases on Steam Day 1.”
The news comes after a difficult few years for Ubisoft, which officially adopted a “more cautious” strategy in 2023 amid disappointing financial results, an announcement that preceded numerous cancellations, staff cuts and delays. Last year, Ubisoft’s share price also fell by more than 50 percent to a near 10-year low, up 1.2 percentage points. Recent Reuters report Poor sales of Star Wars Outlaws and a lack of interest in free-to-play shooter XDefiant were cited as the main reasons for the decline.