Ubisoft’s Quiet Pivot Back to Steam
Ubisoft spent years building a case for Ubisoft Connect – its proprietary launcher and storefront – as the definitive home for its games on PC. Then, starting in late 2023, it began quietly reversing course. Titles that had been pulled from Steam or never listed there at all started reappearing on Valve’s platform, and new releases began launching day-and-date on Steam rather than arriving months later or skipping it entirely. It was not announced with fanfare. Ubisoft simply started showing up again.
That return is still ongoing, and it is raising a question the company has not publicly answered: if Steam is good enough to sell your games, what exactly is your own launcher for? Every new Ubisoft title added to Steam makes Ubisoft Connect feel less like a platform and more like a mandatory background process nobody asked to run.
How Ubisoft Got Here
The story of Ubisoft’s PC distribution strategy over the past decade is essentially a story of following industry trends without fully committing to any of them. When Epic Games Store launched and began paying publishers for exclusivity windows, Ubisoft was among the studios that participated. When the Epic exclusivity strategy started losing momentum – and its limitations became harder to ignore – Ubisoft kept hedging its bets. Its own launcher remained the common denominator through all of it, required regardless of where you actually bought the game.
Ubisoft Connect launched as a rebranding of Uplay in 2020, positioned as a unified ecosystem combining a storefront, a rewards program, and a social layer. The rewards program – Ubisoft Units, later folded into a broader loyalty system – was meant to give players a reason to engage with the launcher beyond just a required install. The logic was sound: if you could build habit around a storefront, you could eventually reduce dependence on Steam’s 30 percent revenue cut. The execution, though, never made Connect feel essential. Most players treated it as a speed bump between buying a game and playing it.
The friction was real and measurable in player behavior. Forum complaints about Ubisoft Connect – crashes, login loops, mandatory updates during launches – became a running joke in PC gaming communities. When Ubisoft started showing weaker-than-expected PC sales figures in earnings calls, the launcher’s role in that underperformance was an obvious variable. Players who bought Ubisoft games on Steam still had to install and run Connect, but players who bought directly through Ubisoft’s storefront had to deal with Connect as both the purchase point and the runtime layer. That was a hard sell against Steam’s polished experience.
What the Steam Return Actually Costs Ubisoft
Returning to Steam means accepting Valve’s revenue share. For a publisher the size of Ubisoft, that cut is real money, particularly on titles like the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises that move significant volume at launch. The calculation Ubisoft appears to have made is that broader visibility and Steam’s built-in audience outweigh the margin loss – a reasonable conclusion given how difficult it has been to drive direct sales through Connect at scale.
There is also the question of discoverability. Steam’s recommendation systems, its wishlist mechanics, and its sale events drive purchasing decisions in ways that a smaller platform simply cannot replicate. A game sitting in Ubisoft’s own storefront competes only within Ubisoft’s catalog. A game on Steam competes across the entire market, but it also benefits from being in front of millions of players who are already in a buying mindset. For mid-cycle sales and catalog recovery – areas where Ubisoft has historically struggled on PC – that difference matters.
The Launcher Loyalty Problem
Ubisoft Connect now occupies an awkward position. It exists as a required component of every Ubisoft PC game, which guarantees it will be installed. But its reason for being as a storefront – capturing direct sales revenue – is being undercut by the Steam return strategy. The more Ubisoft leans into Steam for distribution, the clearer it becomes that Connect’s storefront function is largely redundant for most players.
This is not a unique problem. EA went through a similar reckoning with Origin, eventually rebranding it as EA App and accepting that most of its PC audience would rather buy through Steam even if the game still requires EA’s launcher at runtime. Activision Blizzard has maintained Battle.net as a necessary but not beloved fixture. The pattern across major publishers is the same: proprietary launchers survive as DRM and social layers, but rarely win as storefronts against Steam’s gravity.
What makes Ubisoft’s situation slightly different is timing. The company is returning to Steam during a period when its catalog has taken significant reputational hits. Skull and Bones, XDefiant‘s shutdown, and the prolonged silence around several announced titles have left the publisher in a fragile position with its audience. Steam visibility helps, but it also means negative reviews and playtime data land on a highly trafficked public page. Ubisoft is not just returning to a platform – it is returning to a platform with a very long memory for disappointing launches.
The version of Ubisoft Connect that survives this period will almost certainly be a slimmer one. The loyalty program features, the news feed, the social functions – all of it requires active maintenance and user engagement that simply has not materialized at scale. What remains functional is the authentication layer, the cloud saves, and the achievement system. If Ubisoft is honest with itself about what players actually use, Connect’s future looks a lot more like a background service than a destination. The question is whether the company can make that adjustment without publicly admitting it already made it.
