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During a Ubisoft investor call this evening, CEO Yves Guillemot was asked what his view of Valve’s Steam Deck was. In short: Ubisoft will keep an eye on it.
“We’re happy to see Steam Deck coming to the industry,” said Guillemot. “It shows that there continues a flow of very innovative new hardware coming to the market and so we will look and see how big it becomes. If it is big we will be able to put our games on it.”
That’s about as non-committal as you’d expect from a CEO during an investor call, but it’s interesting nevertheless. Currently Ubisoft have over a hundred games available on Steam, almost all of which will work on the Steam Deck at launch without Ubisoft having to do anything.
More recently however, Ubisoft have kept their games off Steam and released them via Ubisoft Conect and the Epic Games Store. That includes Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs: Legion.
Perhaps if Steam Deck gets big enough, it’ll be an extra incentive for Ubisoft to bring their new games back to Steam and to surrender to Valve’s larger percentage of sales. Steam take between 20 and 30% of a games sales against the Epic Games Store much smaller 12%.
Of course, Ubisoft’s games don’t need to come to Steam for them to be playable on the Steam Deck. It’s a PC through and through, meaning you could just put Windows on there and then install Ubisoft Connect or the Epic Games Store yourself. Steam’s library of games is already huge, too, meaning I’m less interested in publishers bringing more games to the Steam Deck than I am in them supporting the games already on there with controller configs and UI revamps tailored towards the Steam Deck’s shape and screen.
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