In a recent call with investors call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was asked where the company stood when it came to the new Steak Deck Handheld being developed by Valve. According to him, the current path for Ubisoft is to wait and see if the Steam Deck will become big before throwing any support behind it.
While Guillemot stated that he was “Happy” to see more hardware innovations, his statement suggests that just because the hardware is innovative does not warrant any special treatment from the company. As he put it during the call:
We’re happy to see Steam Deck coming to the industry. It shows that there’s a continuous flow of very innovative new hardware coming to the market. We’ll look and see how big it becomes, but if it’s big enough we’ll be able to put our games on it.
Ubisoft has been somewhat unpredictable where they launch their PC games over recent years. While several have been released on Steam, a few have released exclusive to their own marketplace, while currently, they have had a strong partnership with Epic Games Store.
While this should mean that Steam Deck adopters should have access to a select Ubisoft library already, there are further workaround if you are so inclined. It has been suggested that you can completely remove the SteamOS and replace it with windows. This will allow you to put other marketplaces on your system, including Epic Games Store, on the device to get a wider selection. Currently, due to anti-cheating software, this appears to be also the only way to play Rainbow Six: Seige on the system.
In this same call, Guillemot was asked to weigh in on the recent announcement by Netflix that they will be offering games through their streaming service as well. Unlike the Steam Deck, he was quick to suggest that Netflix is in a strong position for success.
Guillemot stated:
Netflix is also another big actor coming into the industry. That’s really good for the industry because it will put emphasis on the fact that content is the most important thing in the industry, and what we see is that Netflix is very dynamic so we expect them to have success.
It would be interesting to see if Ubisoft games might be available through Netflix in the near future.
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