this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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i was genuinely curious because i didn't know. but it does fall in line with what i thought, which is that: if ubisoft are charging lower amounts for dlc that can also be bought through steam, and that dlc shows up for people who are playing on steam, then they're using steam's services and valve are in the right. if the two versions of the game do not commuticate, then ubisoft are in the right.
Any DLC bought outside of Steam, doesn’t work with a Steam game.
A DLC bought in UPlay, might in some way be used by a third party on a crossplay online game, e.g. a map which both the buyer and their friend on Steam can access to, if the buyer creates a game in such map and invites their friend.
And Steam doesn’t take a cut of such sale and cannot set the price, because it wasn’t sold on Steam. Plain and simple.
okay, and you're sure of this? thanks for clearing it up in that case.
but then surely it's against their tos, no? like, if a hat is 50¢ on uplay but 100€ on steam and players on steam can see uplay players wearing the hat, isn't that a case of price disparity in the product? it's not a steam key, true, but if ubisoft were allowed to set prices like that it would almost certainly count as anticompetitive practices, right?
That "hat" bought outside of Steam, cannot be used by a player in Steam.
Are you really saying that Valve should be allowed to set the prices of Ubisoft products, but Ubisoft shouldn't be allowed to price their own products? What?
Why stop there, then? Why wouldn't Steam go after, say, Playstation? Someone gets an exclusive DLC for Playstation that some players can "see" during games, what do we do in that case?
no, obviously i'm not saying that. i'm saying that by having content in the game that costs different amounts for different players playing together on the same platform (pc), ubisoft aren't following the terms they agreed to for selling on steam.
They are. Nowhere it says that a publisher cannot sell their games outside Steam at a different price. Valve employees then threatened Ubisoft with delisting the game if they did.
From the Bloomberg article: https://archive.ph/YvHxF
i was reading through the court documents earlier (i linked them in a comment) and while i don't doubt that bloomberg knows better than me, that wasn't the feel i got from the emails. it started with valve employees asking internally if it was a tos violation, then reaching out to ubisoft, then the demand to change the price on steam to match. the docs are heavily redacted so some details escaped me but... idk.