Assassin’s Creed fans furious as hit game ‘bricked’ on Steam

According to several reports from angry fans online, several Ubisoft titles can no longer be played on Steam… including games from both the Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell franchises.

Dozens of posts have popped up online overnight from folks stating that both Assassin’s Creed II and Splinter Cell: Conviction have been rendered unplayable on Steam.

As one user over on the r/gaming subreddit revealed, it seems that attempting to play the single-player campaign for either game through Steam will present you with an error message stating that there’s some kind of connection issue on Ubisoft’s end.

It seems that there’s some truth to these posts too, at least based on the flurry of recent negative reviews on the Steam page for Assassin’s Creed II.

However, a few of the posts regarding the issue state that Ubisoft did this intentionally by releasing a new update for both titles. Based on the SteamDB records for either game, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

That being said, I don’t think Ubisoft would need to launch any kind of update to actually brick either title, due to the fact that both games require you to be online to play them.

Considering that the single-player campaigns in both Assassin’s Creed II and Splinter Cell: Conviction don’t have any necessary online elements, that might sound absolutely absurd… because it is absolutely absurd.

For whatever reason, Ubisoft decided that both of these games require you to connect to their servers to validate their authenticity before you’re allowed to actually play them. Once again, these are single-player games– games that you have already paid for.

I tried to do a little bit of digging and verify exactly which games were affected, and so far I can only confirm that Assassin’s Creed II and Splinter Cell: Conviction are down.

Hopefully, this is just some kind of mistake on Ubisoft’s end that will eventually be fixed, and not something intentional. Either way, it’s a sobering lesson in game ownership, as it proves that these titles don’t technically belong to you if they can be taken away at a moment’s notice.