Ubisoft just held its Q1 earnings call earlier this morning and CEO Yves Guillemot had some kind words for Valve's new Steam Deck handheld.
When asked by an investor what he thought of the Deck, Yves said: "We're happy to see Steam Deck coming to the industry, it shows that it continues a flow of very innovative new hardware coming to the market. So we will look and see how big it becomes, but if it's big we will be able to put our games on it."
Ubisoft’s back catalog is mostly still available on Steam with a few exceptions, but anything published after 2019 is only available from either Uplay or the Epic Games Store. That’s thanks to an exclusive deal that saw Ubisoft jump ship from Steam to Epic starting with The Division 2.
At the time, Ubisoft said that was mostly due to Epic’s generous 12% cut on sales as opposed to Steam’s 30%, but thanks to the Apple v Epic case, we’ve recently found out that Epic also promised Ubosisoft “minimum revenue guarantees.”
Steam is making no such offers to Ubisoft, but if the Deck brings back as many lapsed Steam users as some are expecting, the Deck might be too big a deal for the French publisher to pass up.
Yves also had some words for Netflix during this morning's investor call. The streaming service has plans to get into the games business with a focus on mobile titles--an area where Ubisoft is struggling to make inroads.
"Netflix is also another big actor coming into the industry," Guillemot said of the soon-to-be rival. "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."
In other Ubisoft news, a Kotaku deep-dive revealed that Skull & Bones has been suffering 8 years of development hell thanks to constant employee turnover and new managers that have rebuilt the game from the ground up several times. Only "generous subsidies" from the Singapore government are keeping the game afloat.