Update: It seems all three games discussed below are now back up on the US Steam store, though they are still unavailable in the UK. We'll continue to monitor the situation and reach out for comment from Ubisoft and Valve.

Original Story

PC gamers who want to download upcoming Ubisoft titles like Far Cry 4, The Crew, and Assassin's Creed: Unity won't be able to go through Valve's Steam service, it seems. The Steam store pages for all three of those holiday titles have been taken down, being pulled in the UK early yesterday and disappearing in the US and other countries over last night and into this morning.

"We've been in discussions with Valve about Assassin's Creed Unity but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK," a Ubisoft spokesperson told PCGamesN after the game was removed from the UK version of the store yesterday. "In the meantime, UK customers wishing to purchase the game digitally can do so by visiting the Uplay store, our retail partners, or other digital distributors."

Dozens of older Ubisoft-published titles are still available on Valve's digital download service, so it seems the company has not pulled out of Steam completely. The upcoming games are still available on EA's Origin store, and through third-party services like Green Man Gaming and GamersGate, which resell codes usable on Ubisoft's own Uplay download service. Oddly enough, the Steam Community pages for Ubisoft's holiday titles are still up as of this writing and are quickly filling up with threads from concerned and confused customers.

It's possible that the Steam removal is simply a technical snafu, but Ubisoft's statement and the history of competition between Uplay and Steam in the digital download space suggests it probably isn't. After launching Uplay exclusively with Ubisoft-published games in 2009, Ubisoft began competing with Steam more directly by selling games from rival publishers on the service early last year.

Pulling these titles off of Steam mere weeks before their release is a pretty unexpected move, considering that all three games have been available for pre-purchase on Steam for months. It's unclear how Valve will handle refunds for those who have already put money down on the games that have gone missing; both Ubisoft and Valve have yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars.

Back in 2011, EA removed Battlefield 3 from Steam over what it termed "restrictive terms of service" regarding distribution of patches and other content. Since then, EA has limited its Steam offerings to DLC packs for existing games , while selling its new titles on its own Origin distribution service.

Uplay has not exactly endeared itself to the PC gaming community, having had a string of technical errors and intrusive DRM snafus that eroded many players' trust in the service. That hasn't stopped Ubisoft from pushing tighter integration with the Uplay client in its games—even Ubisoft titles launched through Steam often require users to log in with a Uplay account. Yet the latest Uplay client update also increased the service's integration with Steam, showing all of a player's Steam-bought Ubisoft titles in the Uplay interface.