To paraphrase our own website: “They all come crawlin’ back to Steam.” Despite attempts to strike out alone with their own storefronts, we’ve watched publisher after publisher concede that expecting customers to go to a different, worse store was—perhaps—less than ideal for sales figures.
And yet, despite all those wayward Diablos, Call of Duties, Assassin’s Creeds, and Red Dead Redemptions returning to the nightmarish market consolidation of Valve’s digital fiefdom, outliers still remain. Through our expertise, insight, and just kinda feeling out the vibes, we’ve guessed at the odds for whether some of the more stubborn Steam holdouts might someday join the fold.
World of Warcraft
(Image credit: Blizzard)
Original release date: November 2004
Chance of releasing on Steam: 30%
Rationale: I’d put the odds even lower if other recent Activision-Blizzard games like Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 hadn’t meekly shuffled onto Steam themselves. My suspicion—without any expert basis, mind—is that the tech handling WoW’s various subscriptions, character services, and cosmetic offerings is entangled pretty thoroughly with Blizzard’s backend thanks to developing in tandem with the current iteration of Battle.net.
Diablo 4 and Modern Warfare 2 might’ve been developed to allow some amount of portability between storefronts, if there was an understanding that eventual Steam releases were a real possibility. World of Warcraft, meanwhile, is two decades’ worth of gnarled, intertwined technology that leaves any retrofits with a reasonable chance of blowing up the Auction House or generating an apocalypse of server layers.
Transplanting WoW to Steam would, I expect, be months—if not years—of work, and the reward would mean handing off a percentage of revenue to Steam from players who’ve already been comfortable accessing WoW through Battle.net for twenty years. Not to mention that Blizzard does not want to share 30% of those monthly WoW subscriptions, an arrangement that none of its other games share.
Ultima
(Image credit: Origin)
Original release date: 1981
Chance of releasing on Steam: 60%
Rationale: Considering that the Ultima games helped formalize our expectations for the RPG genre—hell, if it wasn’t for Swen Vincke’s obsession with Ultima 7, we’d have never gotten Baldur’s Gate 3—it feels a little bit like a cosmic injustice that the series has never been available on Steam. Sure, there are difficulties involved with making games dating back to the early 80s playable on current PC hardware. A lot of that work, however, seems like it’s already been done, because the Ultima games are available both on the EA app and GOG.
I was initially going to give Ultima a lower chance of someday heading to Steam, and I was going to blame EA’s ownership of the series for the grim outlook. EA did start releasing its games on Steam again in 2019, but that mostly constituted new releases and the occasional Mass Effect Legendary Edition. In 2024, however, EA seems to be reappraising its catalogue of classic titles by offering Steam releases of Populous, Command & Conquer, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and more.
With any luck, EA will eventually turn its eye toward the realm of Lord British. I’m still leaving myself plenty of room for disappointment.
Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero
(Image credit: miHoYo)
Original release date: September 2020, April 2023, July 2024
Chance of releasing on Steam: 40%
Rationale: This is a tricky one. On one hand, the MiHoYo’s built an entire ecosystem for its gacha repertoire, with its own launchers and a bespoke social media platform for obsessing over favorite characters—all managed under the aptly-named publishing subsidiary HoYoverse. It’s a world all unto itself, built solely around the dark allure of gambling for anime characters. What does it need Steam for?
And yet, the MiHoYo gachas are already on other storefronts. They’re not just available on the Google and Apple app stores; they’re also on the Epic Games Store. It’s unclear whether Epic and MiHoYo signed one of the exclusivity agreements that CEO Tim Sweeney has called “not good investments,” or whether Epic’s 12% revenue cut just seemed like a worthwhile price to pay for putting Genshin Impact in front of players while they’re launching Fortnite or scrolling through the store’s front page to find this week’s free game.
If it’s the latter, it’s likely that Steam’s heftier 30% revenue cut is too much of a deterrent for MiHoYo if it’s not having trouble finding users elsewhere. Maybe that math will change if MiHoYo gets desperate for new players someday, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Fortnite
(Image credit: Epic Games)
Original release date: July 2017
Chance of releasing on Steam: 2%
Rationale: Not while Tim Sweeney has any say in the matter. Epic has waged a long-running legal battle against Google and Apple to prevent anyone else from carving revenue slices off the Fortnite golden calf. If Fortnite brings in enough money that Epic could safely pull it from the hundreds of millions of potential users on mobile storefronts while battling things out in court, the publisher has no reason to put it on Steam just so Valve can claim 30% of the pie. The Epic Games Store might struggle to turn a profit otherwise, but as long as it’s a vehicle for Epic to reap its V-bucks revenue without splitting the wealth, that’s where Fortnite’s going to stay.
League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Valorant, 2XKO
(Image credit: Riot Games)
Original release dates: October 2009, June 2019, June 2020, TBD
Chance of releasing on Steam: 15%
Rationale: While Riot hasn’t joined Epic in attempting to sue its way to releasing games on Google and Apple phones without platform fees, my estimation here is in line with my Fortnite assessment: Generally, I think Riot’s got too good of a thing going with its League skins and Valorant guns to hand Valve 30% of that income. I expect that’ll hold true for its fighting game 2XKO, too.
It doesn’t help that Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 are the biggest competitors for League and Valorant. Handing over nearly a third of your sales is bad enough without it directly enriching the games people are playing instead of yours.
The main reason I give Riots’ games a slightly higher chance of hitting Steam is that it’s already getting friendly with other platforms. There’s a mobile version of League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics on both app stores, Valorant is on Game Pass, and Riot recently threw its full weight behind a Valorant console port. Not to mention it already published League of Legends spinoffs like Ruined King and Song of Nunu through its Riot Forge label. But considering Riot closed Riot Forge at the start of the year, that doesn’t count for much, if it ever would’ve in the first place.
Minecraft
(Image credit: Mojang)
Original release date: November 2011
Chance of releasing on Steam: 50%
Rationale: Compared to most of the entries on this list, a Steam release of Minecraft would be a lot less surprising to me. Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Legends are already on Steam, and Minecraft’s Bedrock Edition is on every PlayStation, Nintendo, and mobile platform despite Microsoft’s ownership.
I’ve kept it at even odds, however, for two reasons: One, on PC, both the Java and Bedrock editions come with launchers attached. Considering how obnoxious it is to tell those two apart, let alone understanding when and where you even have them installed, I imagine it wouldn’t make for the easiest Steam integration. Two, I’m not sure how many people there are who would be interested in playing Minecraft that don’t already own it on PC in one form or another.
Still, I’m sure there are people who’d be willing to pay for it on Steam just to avoid the mess that tends to come with installing games from the Microsoft Store.
Star Citizen
(Image credit: Roberts Space Industries)
Original release date: First playable module in August 2013
Chance of releasing on Steam: 15%
Rationale: Star Citizen’s infamous crowdfunding campaign pulled in millions of dollars, promising to deliver “everything that made Wing Commander and Privateer/Freelancer special” through a persistent simulated universe that, some would say, is still largely theoretical in 2024.
Star Citizen, alongside its Squadron 42 spinoff, is managing to monetize itself on the merits of the game it might someday become, despite RSI’s eternally shifting timelines. With its own launchers and “pledge store” already in place, I suspect that’s a scheme whose profits RSI is content to keep to itself, and a potential swamp of refund claims and customer discontent that I doubt Valve would be thrilled to bear the brunt of.
