Back in 2022, Far Cry 6 finally made the jump to Steam. For PC players who had spent months avoiding the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft's own Uplay, that was not a small footnote. It was a signal that Ubisoft's storefront strategy was shifting. The game had launched in 2021 without a Steam release, which meant anyone who wanted it on PC had to use Epic or Ubisoft Connect. When the Steam page went live in spring 2022, alongside pages for Riders Republic and Rainbow Six Extraction, the message was clear: Ubisoft was ready to share its library again.

The timing was staggered. Far Cry 6 was set to arrive on May 11, 2022, complete with all updates added since its 2021 launch. Riders Republic and Rainbow Six Extraction were both scheduled for June. None of the three games were available for pre-order, so Ubisoft did not seem interested in dangling exclusive perks in front of early buyers. That detail mattered. It suggested the company was not treating Steam as a special event, but as another shelf where its games could sit.

Why did that matter? For years, PC players had complained about launcher fatigue. They did not want to download five different stores to play five different games. Some enthusiasts outright refused to buy a game until it appeared on Steam, no matter how good it looked. Far Cry 6 had already built a reputation as a big, chaotic open-world shooter, but its absence from Steam kept a chunk of the audience away. Bringing it to Steam opened the door for those holdouts.

The move also followed Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which had arrived on Steam in December 2021. That was an important precedent. If one of Ubisoft's biggest recent games could come to Steam after an exclusivity period, others could too. It remains unclear whether a deal with Epic expired or whether the Epic exclusivity simply was not profitable enough for Ubisoft's PC business. Either way, the result was the same: more Ubisoft games were showing up on Steam, or at least arriving there later.

Ubisoft was not only rethinking Steam. Around the same time, Ubisoft+ was added to Xbox through the Multi Access Plan. At $17.99 a month, it was pricier than Game Pass Ultimate at $14.99 a month. But it let subscribers play new Ubisoft games from day one at no extra cost. That was another way of saying the company wanted its library in more places, on more devices, and in front of more people. The old walled-garden approach was becoming harder to justify.

In 2026, this whole saga looks like an early chapter in a larger shift. The storefront wars have not disappeared, but they have softened. Players still deal with multiple launchers, and Ubisoft still has its own ecosystem, yet Steam remains the default home for a huge portion of the PC audience. A Ubisoft game might launch first on Epic or Ubisoft Connect, but the question is no longer whether it will reach Steam. It is when. Far Cry 6 helped establish that expectation.

For Ubisoft, the lesson was simple: meeting players where they already are can revive interest in a game long after launch. For PC players, the lesson was even simpler: patience can pay off. A game that once required a specific launcher eventually became available on the platform they preferred. That does not mean every exclusivity window is worth the wait, but it does show that platform decisions are rarely permanent.

So when Far Cry 6 arrived on Steam, it was more than a re-release. It was a quiet admission that the PC market is too broad to lock behind one storefront. Riders Republic and Rainbow Six Extraction followed the same path, and Ubisoft's back catalogue became less fragmented as a result. In 2026, that may seem obvious. In 2022, it was a welcome change. 🎮