The mandatory publisher launcher is having a rough decade, and Ubisoft just added another entry to the obituary column. On September 10, 2026, a Steam update note attached to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown revealed that the company is testing a way to run its Steam games without the Ubisoft Connect desktop client sitting in the middle.
The post was surfaced on Reddit by a user going by NostalgiaKeeper007, and it names the replacement plainly. “Starting with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, we are testing a new Ubisoft Connect Services Steam tool that keeps Ubisoft game features such as cross-progression, cross-play, player safety, challenges and rewards, among others, without requiring the Ubisoft Connect PC launcher to be installed or launched,” Ubisoft wrote.
That is the whole trick: Ubisoft is peeling the online plumbing away from the client that used to carry it. The features listed as surviving the split are:
- Cross-progression between platforms
- Cross-play
- Player safety tooling
- Challenges and rewards
Ubisoft framed the rollout as deliberately unfinished. “This first version is an initial step toward a smoother and more streamlined experience on Steam,” the message reads, adding that the company will “continue to iterate and improve Ubisoft Connect Services over time, with the goal of delivering the features and services players use and expect while making the Steam experience as seamless as possible.” The test is not meant to end with one game either, since Ubisoft Connect Services “will progressively evolve and roll out to more Ubisoft games on Steam in the future.”
Confirming any of this from the outside is awkward. Polygon reports that the linked Steam page appears to be visible only to people who already own The Lost Crown. Searching for “Ubisoft” in Steam’s news feed surfaces part of the message, but following the link throws an error. PCGamesN adds that a Ubisoft Connect account still has to be authenticated against Steam, so this is the end of the standalone launcher rather than the end of the Ubisoft account.
Why the celebration? Players have never needed much convincing to dislike a second launcher. Opening Steam only to wait for another client to boot is the mild version of the complaint. The sharper objections are the publisher-specific accounts gating games people already paid for, and the DRM that tends to ride along with them.
The cautionary tale doing the rounds right now is Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. The Sony-published fighter demands a PSN login on Steam, which is a genuine problem in the many countries where PSN is not available. Players have also blamed background PSN services for the game’s performance, and modders stripping out the DRM reported large frame rate gains. Tokon does not even use a launcher, which rather proves the point about what this software drags in with it.
Reddit’s response to Ubisoft’s change was less analytical. “Please dear Lord roll it back to previous Ubisoft games so I can play them on steam machine without proton tricks,” one commenter wrote, which is roughly the entire Linux handheld crowd speaking at once.
