Why Isn’t Assassin’s Creed Shadows Coming to Steam? Answered

The upcoming title Assassin’s Creed Shadows will not be hitting the Steam store, despite being available on PCs from the get-go. But this is quite a common practice for releases lately, and there’s a pretty good reason for that.

Why Can’t You Play Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Steam?

Much like all other Assassin’s Creed titles, Shadows is a Ubisoft exclusive, which means that if you’re a PC player, you won’t be finding it anywhere else other than Ubisoft’s exclusive store, Ubisoft+ and Epic Games Store, which has a direct partnership with them. This is a common practice for all these titles as exclusives, kept purposely in the store to attract more users and potential players instead of lending them to PC competitors.

This is also why when a game is available on Xbox consoles, they’re also available on the Xbox app on PCs. There’s little they can do in those cases, as it’s always better for companies to have the game on Xbox consoles. If they want to have it, bringing it to the PC store is a non-negotiable point.

Related: All Pre-Order Bonuses & Editions for Assassin’s Creed Shadows

However, Steam has no such deals, so these exclusive titles end up away from the store. Aside from the Assassin’s Creed franchise, other recent titles that received the same treatment were Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. But as long as they’re not exclusives, they’ll be available on Steam even if they belong to the same franchise (such as The Rogue: Prince of Persia, which is not an exclusive).

So yeah, it all boils down to corporate things in the end. So you’ll have to leap directly to a different store other than Steam if you want to play Assassin’s Creed Shadows and visit Yasuke and Naoe’s stories later this year. From all we’ve seen so far, it’ll be worth the trouble.