Ubisoft's upcoming shooter is launching on both the UPlay Store and the Epic Games Store, making it one of the first big releases to bypass Steam in favor of Epic's fledgling platform.
Ubisoft’s upcoming shooter The Division 2 is launching on both Ubisoft's Uplay Store and the Epic Games Store on PC, making it one of the first triple-A releases to bypass Steam in favor of Epic’s fledgling platform.
The jump is the result of a newly forged partnership between Ubisoft and Epic Games that will see a handful of future Ubisoft games announced for the platform this year.
Additionally, the team up means the two companies are working to integrate certain “key components” of Uplay and Epic’s online services, with a focus on social features and interoperability, potentially meaning that The Division 2's Uplay account-based features could be housed in the Epic Game Store version itself, rather than through an external launcher.
The PC version of The Division 2 has been up for preorder on Steam for some time already, but the listing for the game has already vanished from the Steam store and search. Though the game won’t be hitting Steam officially, Ubisoft notes in a press release that any pre-orders placed on platforms other than Uplay and the Epic Game Store will still be honored, despite the recent semi-exclusivity announcement.
The Epic Game Store officially launched last month and notably breaks away from the industry-standard 70/30 revenue split, instead offering developers 88 percent of their overall revenue. The platform has so far attracted attention from a number of indie developers, including the likes of Supergiant Games who launched its early access game Hades as an Epic Games Store exclusive and a number of other studios that have since pulled their games from Steam in favor of Epic’s new digital storefront.
Steam recently remodeled its revenue split policies, an overhaul that came just days before Epic revealed its Steam competitor. Those changes, which are notably geared more toward the triple-A crowd, drop Valve’s share of revenue from 30 percent to 25 percent for any revenue generated over $10 million. For games that earn over $50 million, that split is then changed to 80/20 percent share on that bit of revenue.
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