Epic Games and Ubisoft ate partnering up to release The Division 2 via Epic Games Store instead of Steam. This means that Ubisoft will completely skip Steam for its next game launch and release the game via its own launcher, Uplay, and Epic Games Store exclusively.
Players will be able to pre-order the game through Epic Games Store and they will receive access to the private beta automatically. All three versions of The Division 2 are now available on Epic Games Store which include Standard, Ultimate and Gold editions.
The game’s page on Steam has been removed however any orders placed on Steam will not be rejected. Players who pre-ordered on Steam will still get the game on Steam. At this point, The Division 2’s page is not live. It may come back online at a later stage but it seems highly unlikely.
Apart from launching the game on Epic Games Store, both Ubisoft and Epic Games are also working on integrating some key components of Uplay so that players can experience similar gameplay elements on both clients. This will ensure seamless social features and interoperability.
This partnership between Epic Games and Ubisoft is not limited to only The Division 2 as more Ubisoft titles will be released on PC through Epic Games Store exclusively. These titles will be announced in the future.
This is a very big decision of Ubisoft and only time will tell whether skipping Steam was a good idea or not. Fans of the series are giving mixed reactions at this point. Most of them are however not happy as they do not want to move away from Steam.
For now, everyone who wants to play The Division 2 on PC will either need Epic Games Store or Uplay. Epic Games launched their own game store last year with the promise of giving 88% sales share to developers.
This has certainly attracted a lot of developers to the store but the main questions still exist whether players are ready to switch to Epic Games Store and leave Steam behind. Epic is surely trying its best to get as many developers on board with them to break Steam’s stronghold.
The Division 2 is slated to release on PS4, Xbox One and PC via Uplay and Epic Games Store.
