Steam is highly valued by many gamers, not only for being a fairly inexpensive, easy way to buy and manage games, but also because it provides statistics on player count and play times, via tools like SteamDB, which are a neat way for gamers to see how the community is participating in games before buying them. According to a post on the FandomPulse Substack, however, Ubisoft has taken issue with Valve's player statistics.

The Substack post quotes Ubisoft insiders who claim that the game developer and "other companies" want Valve to disable or restrict the APIs used by tools like SteamDB and Steam Charts as a direct response to the disappointing performance of Star Wars Outlaws. This news also comes ahead of the early 2025 launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows, which has already caused significant apprehension as a result of game previews. The claims also mention that Ubisoft seeks to control the narrative of its games and potentially present a rosier image to its investors. If Ubisoft has its way, the gaming industry would lose even more transparency, since tools like SteamDB are often used by game journalists to evaluate the popularity and commercial success of games.

"Ubisoft and other companies want to pressure Steam to stop the tracker from giving out info they want to keep to themselves... They want to be able to present findings to investors so they can make it sound good."

It should be noted that, while this sort of behavior would not be surprising from a large corporation in the modern gaming landscape, the claims are also unverified, putting this squarely in rumor territory.

According to SteamDB, Star Wars Outlaws only managed to sell around 45,000 units on the PC platform, and other sources say that it only managed to sell around 1 million copies in its first month, falling well short of the profitability mark for a AAA game.