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No more obnoxious switching.

Steam is pretty great. EA’s Origin and Ubisoft’s nearly u-seless uPlay? Less so. While more competition for Steam is never a bad thing, EA and Ubisoft have mostly succeeded at forcing people to jump through extra hoops to get at their games. Different stores, different friends lists, different DRM, different interfaces, etc. It’s a pain. The goal of Project Ascension? To lessen that pain by unifying Steam, Origin, uPlay, and any other PC game client that might have built a little birdhouse in your e-soul.

In short, Project Ascension aims to bring everything under one roof. As the developers put it:

“Project Ascension’s intent is to create an open-source and multi-platform launcher for storing games, searching for good deals and prices, and optionally using community features.”


It’s not meant to replace the likes of Steam, Origin, and uPlay. Rather, Project Ascension will (hopefully) cut down on hassle as much as possible. The interface looks functional enough, but it’s obviously still early. I definitely like many of the ideas behind it, though—especially the deal optimizer.

Project Ascension is being created by a team of 18 volunteers, which ups the chances that not all of them will survive stick around until the end of development. That said, if all goes according to plan there will be an open beta this fall, followed by a full release sometime after that.


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To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.