It’s kind of hard to see the massive discounts on Ubisoft games on Steam this week and not think: fire sale! The company’s stock price took a head-first dive in January after its latest botched attempt at “restructuring,” and incredibly it’s yet to show any signs of recovery. Share prices today are the same as they were on the day of that January 22 crash, leaving the company worth less than a twentieth of its value in 2018. Things are bad. So presumably there’s hope that knocking half the price off of last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows might at least keep the lights on.
It’s actually a fantastic sale for us. Games less than two years old are up to 90 percent off, and top-notch classics have similar discounts off their already far lower prices. Because for as badly run as Ubisoft appears to have been for many years, the publisher puts out some genuinely excellent games. And a game as interesting as the “crappy masterpiece” Star Wars Outlaws (in its much-improved updated version) being just $21 is something to take advantage of. Here are a few suggestions of games to grab while they’re cheap:
Assassin’s Creed Shadows – $35
Last year’s entry into the long-running Assassin’s Creed series was good at launch, has been updated since release, and reached fine fettle by September 2025. You play as both a stealthy shinobi assassin and a formidable samurai, fusing parkour goodness, stealthy fighting, and more overt action in one of the most spectacularly pretty games ever made. If your machine can cope. It had another raft of improvements last fall, and right now is 50 percent off.
Far Cry Primal – $3
I love Far Cry Primal. The Far Cry series has been hit-or-miss, the latter mostly due to reheated ideas. But Primal took the format somewhere new…well, old, with the action set 10,000 years in the past and the guns replaced with pointy sticks but keeping all the same base-raiding, animal-hunting, skin-peeling antics that makes the series fun. It came out in 2016 and still looks extremely pretty, and at 90 percent off is available for the comically low price of three bucks.
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – $3
Jokes about Tom Clancy still making games 13 years after his death are now so old as to have died themselves, but still, the poor man’s name is attached to so many Ubisoft games. “Grandaddy, what is a Tom Clancy?” ask today’s young players, and are told to hush because I’m trying to snipe the bad man’s head off. The Division 2 has had a bit of a tumultuous ride for those playing it as a live-service game, losing a lot of fans over the years since its original 2019 release, but if you started playing today for just $3 you’re in for a really decent core game.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – $30
I would never have thought to play the movie tie-in game of the Avatar movie franchise, if it weren’t for Zack’s passionate campaigning for the game to get the attention he says it deserves. It’s 35 percent off during this sale, making it a much more reasonable $30 if you’re willing to trust the man. Although it’s also just been added to Game Pass, if you’re looking to pay even less.
Star Wars Outlaws – $21
Outlaws had a rough ride on release. That was partly because it launched with far too many bugs, broken stealth, and enemy AI that really leaned hard on the “A”, but also partly because of the worst people on the internet putting Musk-endorsed effort into destroying it because the game had the temerity to feature a woman as its main character. But ignore those knuckle-dragging knob-heads, because it remains a fantastic experience, especially now that so many of the bugs have been ironed out, and the stealth much improved. It’s 70 percent off, which is a significant chunk for a game only 16 months old.
