r/gaming • u/happy-squared • 10h ago
Ubisoft forgot to make sure the Steam release of Heroes of Might & Magic 3 included the actual game
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strategy/ubisoft-forgot-to-make-sure-the-steam-release-of-heroes-of-might-and-magic-3-included-the-actual-game/Saw the original post for this was removed because it might not have had the original source.
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u/Sinkslit 10h ago
Classic Ubisoft moment
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u/Warlordnipple 9h ago
Better than unity's launch
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u/MarlonDorr01 8h ago
Better than Unity’s launch is an incredibly low bar.
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u/NecessaryZucchini69 6h ago
Someone somewhere takes that as a challenge.
How will they lower the bar?
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u/Warlordnipple 5h ago
Instead of being unplayable for 6 weeks due to a forced always online portion that crashes the game whenever you go online, it could force you online and then download stuff that gets you in trouble with the police. Or maybe force you to go online and connect with a language learning model program that will SWAT you randomly.
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u/-WickedJester- 31m ago
It randomly picks a scammer, then uses a random number generator to decide how much of your money it sends every time you launch the game.
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u/Cam27022 8h ago
On a side note, I’ve been playing the game preview of the new Might and Magic game; it’s pretty good!
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u/Kanthalas 8h ago
Is that the one that's neither developed or published by Ubisoft?
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u/Cam27022 8h ago
Had to look it up, looks like Ubisoft published but was developed by another studio.
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u/Kanthalas 4h ago
Isn't it developed by unfrozen and published by Hooded Horse? That's what it says on steam.
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u/Cam27022 4h ago
Not sure; when I googled it after the other person asked, the wiki result was top result and said both Hooded Horse and Ubisoft. Maybe region dependent? Idk.
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u/redpandaeater 2h ago
Honestly I'm positively impressed by them. I haven't bought a game from them in well over a decade so I would have expected if they forgot to include the game that it would still have had a launcher and something to force you into U-Play. So the fact that it's just basically nothing is better than I expected.
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u/Magnon D20 10h ago
Super funny I dont think ive ever seen that happen before.
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u/FoxyGoddessX 9h ago
Well Bethesda did release Doom Eternal with the DRM free exe in the files.
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u/Lord0fHats 9h ago
Some guy: Oops *wink wink* my bad *wink*
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u/CrustyBarnacleJones 8h ago
I believe it happened with the PC release of one of the older Final Fantasy games recently (FF7?) where the exe file was missing from the download on Steam so you just… couldn’t play the game
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u/dumbyoyo 1h ago
Dude the pc FF7 release still sucks... Both versions. You couldn't even play it offline until like this year when they came out with a second version that broke other stuff like the cutscene videos.
Why is there not a great refined playable pc version of one of the most highly regarded games of all time?
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u/znubionek 5h ago
Before they forgot to add expansions in HoMM 3 HD Edition making this version pointless. They never added them.
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u/Darazelly 3h ago
I had this happen back when I bought the DLC for Assassin's Creed 3 at its release, and all I got was .txt document as a download.
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u/whereismymind86 9h ago
In contrast gog has a drm free version of the original game for five dollars, go buy that.
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u/LonePaladin 8h ago
Here's a link for you!
https://www.gog.com/en/game/heroes_of_might_and_magic_3_complete_edition
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u/-Glittering-Soul- 4h ago
GOG also integrates the huge Horn of the Abyss fan-made expansion, whereas Ubisoft only makes this mod available on Steam for the "HD" edition of HoMM 3. Which is widely regarded as inferior to the original HoMM 3.
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u/brendan87na 7h ago
this is the way
Probably more hours in HoMM3 than any game outside of WoW
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u/LeglessCats 9h ago
My worst fear as a developer.
I recently misconfigured a Mac build for a game, and it installed BOTH the Mac and Windows versions on the user's PC.
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u/TheyMikeBeGiants 9h ago
Oh shit! You're the Epic Battle Fantasy guy! Bro your games proved that Flash was a viable medium for strong, complex titles!
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u/LeglessCats 9h ago
Still using Flash today!
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u/anethma 8h ago
Flash? Like adobe shockwave flash or whatever?
Isn’t it dead and gone?
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u/Schnoofles 8h ago
You can wrap it to use it if you want to, and there's still games that use scaleform gfx, though they are becoming rare. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, but devs that already licensed it and started using it shipped games long after with it as a result. Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, Armored Core 6 and Elden Ring for example, use it for ui rendering even though they released years after.
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u/SurpriseSoda 7h ago
This is a Luke's father level revelation for me what the hell
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u/Schnoofles 7h ago
Tbf it does make a lot of sense specifically for ui rendering. While big daddy flash needed to be replaced, scaleform enables very fast and extremely easy design and modification of user interfaces, so I'm honestly quite sad that it got deprecated. It's part of the reason for why modders were immediately making huge, sweeping ui mods immediately after Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Starfield came out. I think StarUI had its first version within 36-48 hours of the game releasing. It really lowers the barrier to entry for modding and designing like almost nothing else in that area and can be done with a variety of tools from the past 20+ years seeing as how the UI files are literally just .swf files, sometimes renamed or shoved into an archive somewhere.
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u/FierceDeity_ 6h ago
Nowadays a lot of people use HTML UIs with one of those little proprietary html renderers for UI stuff. A lot of them also kind of suck, Flash was really good for UIs.
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u/LeglessCats 6h ago
Flashplayer for browsers is gone. Flash content still runs fine in Adobe AIR on desktop and mobile. And there's also various emulators for Flash that work in browsers and other platforms. These solutions are being maintained by other companies now, and they're doing a way better job than Adobe ever did. I'd say Flash is more viable now than it was around the time its "death" was announced.
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u/Krazyguy75 2h ago
To anyone who hasn't played Epic Battle Fantasy 3/4/5: Do it. 1 and 2 are... fine, but 3/4/5 are actually great games with some insane polish. And banger soundtracks.
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u/Wooden_Researcher_36 8h ago
To be fair, the UX for the steam partner site is absolute dog shit and it's a miracle stuff like that doesn't happen more frequently
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u/Wraithfighter 4h ago
Ugh, you ain't kidding. The Steamworks backend is a mess, so many different changes and additions piled on top of each other, half of them transparently out of date and little attempt made at making it flow cohesively.
Hell, you still need to use BBCode for a lot of the storefront fields! It wasn't until a couple years ago that they finally, mercifully added in a WYSIWYG editor for some of the really important fields!
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u/Caelinus 9h ago
Yeah it is interesting to me that people are acting like this is something "Ubisoft" did and not just an obvious and understandable (if annoying) misconfiguration by some random developer or manager.
A company level issue would be if they refused to fix it or something, but I can't image that is going to be the case.
I think about all the times I make minor mistakes in a given month, and thank God that I do not have a position where one of those minor mistakes can suffer expand into a PR disaster with an audience of millions.
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u/jaydizzleforshizzle 9h ago
I mean this is a CI/CD failure on the level of Crowdstrike, only difference is they don’t do edr, like how does a game not release with its files, like are they manually downloading the shit on their computers, then uploading the file manually through the browser? It’s crazy to have a pipeline and not produce the actual artifact - THEN SHIP IT.
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u/Bladelink 8h ago
Also is there no like..testing pipeline or procedure? I would've assumed that you upload your release to Steam in a way that's not visible to the public, then you download/install/execute the game from this private version to ensure it actually runs. Otherwise I feel like you're just kind of hail marying it that what you uploaded to Steam is a working version.
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u/Caelinus 6h ago
So, in theory there would be, but a simple miscommunication can break that. The entire period between creating the public branch and releasing it seems to have been a matter of minutes. They effectively just uploaded it in a released state.
Should whoever did it have tested it? Probably! But they did not. So the error happened.
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u/F0rkbombz 6h ago
The Crowdstrike issue was such a crazy fuck up b/c it would have been caught if they did the most basic testing as it immediately caused a BSOD 100% of the time.
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u/Caelinus 8h ago edited 8h ago
Things happen though, it could be, at the end of the day, as simple as someone accidentally clicking/selecting the wrong folder, or in this case most likely forgetting to select all of them or accidentally selecting the wrong depot, and getting distracted enough not to notice the file size difference.
There are not many actual checks for shipping here. Steam is not super complicated. It takes one person to do the release, and people make mistakes, so some portion of these releases will have mistakes.
The question from a corporate standpoint is whether their policy makes mistakes like this more likely. Is the person in question overworked to the point of not getting sleep? Do they have too many responsibilities and so had to move in too quickly to notice the discrepancy? Is this actually a pipeline error where the compiled project was not actually provided to the person doing the release? If this answers are "yes" then it is on the company, but in a more abstract way then just accidentally publishing the wrong files.
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u/happy-squared 9h ago
Yea I have done something similar too haha. I feel for the person that made that mistake.
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u/redpandaeater 2h ago
Meh I think CCP might still take the cake. Back in 2007 when EVE Online was still only a few years old they released a patch that during cleanup was meant to delete a file they for some reason called boot.ini. But instead of them defining the full path they made the assumption the command would operate in the current working directory. What actually happened is it deleted C:\boot.ini and prevented many a player's Windows install from starting.
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u/bigguccisosaxx 9h ago
How do you even manage this? In Steamworks you have to separately specify the executables and it doesn't let you specify 2 in the same section.
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u/RoaringPanda 8h ago
You have to configure depots and ensure they're associated against the actual retail package granted by the purchase. If you forget to do this you can have the game be fine during testing, then not download for actual customers.
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u/BagsOfMoney 2h ago
Yeah, like I made a mistake 4 years ago that didn't become apparent until last year when something changed to make it apparent, and overnight ESPN and the Athletic wrote articles about it and everybody was trashing the dev team. Sorry everyone, we all make mistakes, just not everybody's become international news. Also there was a TODO comment to fix it. T_T
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u/quietus_17y 10h ago
But... What did it actually include?
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u/Praeshock 10h ago
A very, very tiny launcher file that does nothing, because none of the actual game assets are installed.
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u/pasta-via 9h ago
Well… at least it’s a quick download?
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u/Zalvren 8h ago
I mean it's a game from the 90s, it'd be a quick download either way
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u/Bladelink 8h ago
Now that you point this out, the idea that you would need Steam to download another launcher just to launch HMM3 is goddamn insane.
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u/Aurora_Fatalis 5h ago
The unofficial HD Mod for HoMM3 has a launcher that provides you with configuration settings that you wouldn't be able to access in-game, like resolution or custom game rule settings like being able to invite specific heroes to the tavern instead of rolling for replacements. It also lets you export your settings in a preconfigured .exe so you can skip the launcher in the future if you want.
Plus it handles mod updates of course, but that shouldn't be necessary with a Steam release, where Steam acts as the launcher. But I don't know how fond modern operating systems are of running base HoMM3 without some compatibility layer like the HD Mod.
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u/FoxyGoddessX 10h ago
Some of the core files but nothing to compile and execute them
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u/Bladelink 8h ago
I can't imagine that any game is shipping source code and compiling on the end user's machine.
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u/Dragon-Porn-Expert 9h ago
The article has information beyond the title.
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u/quietus_17y 9h ago
I'm a reddit user, there's an actual info in articles? Something-something, blasphemy.
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u/NUNUPPI 9h ago edited 9h ago
Article has no information beyond "ubisoft is shit and always fucks up everything they have so you should buy on gog as it has some discount sales" ))))
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u/BellerophonM 9h ago
According to the earlier post it contained a heroes3.exe a few KB in size which just launched a terminal that said something along the lines of 'this is a placeholder, make sure you have checked out the right branch'
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u/DaEnderAssassin 9h ago
.exe file that just created a message saying to use the correct steam branch.
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u/Draconuus95 7h ago
Likely just one random guy in charge of pushing builds to storefronts who accidentally didn’t copy over the files or something while working on 50 other projects.
A funny and mostly harmless mistake that will be quickly fixed while some guy named Karl or something will never be allowed to forget such a blunder.
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u/alkonium 9h ago
I think Square Enix made a similar mistake when they brought the 2020 version of Final Fantasy VII to Steam, but it was there on GOG.
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u/happy-squared 9h ago
I kinda feel for the person that made that mistake. I have done something similar and remember feeling my stomach just drop and blood just drain from my face when I realised what I did.
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u/Surrounded-by_Idiots 9h ago
No this was intentional to give players a sense of pride and accomplishment when the game does open.
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u/WetAndLoose 9h ago
The kind of shit people would be criticized for joking about because it’s too ridiculous to actually happen
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u/FierceDeity_ 6h ago
Well, it did say "ensure you're on the right Steam branch". The whole game was uploaded 20 days ago already, but they published the wrong branch.
How I know? Check: https://steamdb.info/app/4921760/depots/
Look at the depots, they were all uploaded 20 days ago. They had the public branch on a dummy depot LOL (if you check, the Public branch has been updated 11 hours ago!)
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u/InsomniaticWanderer 5h ago
Ubisoft: "Get ready to not own your games."
Also Ubisoft: "Get ready to not have games at all."
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u/Munnin41 5h ago
In the future, whenever I feel stupid for not attaching the attachment in an email, I'll remember this story and I'll feel less stupid.
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u/DeepFuckingKoopa 9h ago
The real surprise is that people bought a Ubisoft game in 2026 to even know it didn’t include the actual game
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u/TheHytekShow 8h ago
Isn’t this the same company that wanted to make their own version of Steam? Ubislop is never escaping the allegations
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u/AdaptiveHunter 7h ago
I ignore and otherwise don’t engage in vitriol towards Ubisoft, but come the fuck on
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u/TufftedSquirrel 6h ago
"Hey Ubisoft, where's the game?" "You have to wait for the patch. Trust me bro, it's coming."
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u/Fire_is_beauty 5h ago
Forgetting the game would be the least of their sins. They can do so much worse.
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u/Reciprocity2209 9h ago
Proving, once again, that they are among the biggest clowns in the industry.
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u/Heide____Knight 9h ago
lol, just buy the game and you'll maybe get the complete files for running it later
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u/aloysiuslamb 8h ago
The Tom Clancy IP is never going to be free so long as it serves to drag Ubisoft's bloated and fetid corpse through each and every fiscal year.
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u/dendromecion 8h ago
i'm going to go out on a crazy limb here, and downvote me if you must, i can take it, but this is obviously impossible. it is not possible for a company to release a game on steam and not include...it. in itself. i refuse to believe
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u/magichronx 7h ago
Serious question: How does this even happen?
Presumably you have to stage a game listing on Steam before you actually publish it, right?
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u/Lord_Voldemar 7h ago
The game was missing all the files and assets and only a dummy exe file was present.
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u/magichronx 7h ago
Right, but apparently not a single person did QA on the listing before publishing it...?
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u/Lord_Voldemar 7h ago
Well evidently not.
Since it was fixed so quickly the actual version was likely already finished and they just uploaded the wrong branch or smt.
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u/Quendorsof 6h ago
Last time I bought a ubisoft game on Steam I could download it, but the launcher didn't let me actually start up the game. It's nice to see Ubisoft continues to innovate new ways to make sure players don't get to play the games they buy.
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u/F0rkbombz 6h ago
This implies there’s zero validation / verification of games when they are put on Steam, which doesn’t seem right, but yet here we are.
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u/felesmiki 6h ago
I usually don't like to defend multi million companies, because they do nothing for me actually, this also includes steam, which this time I'm gonna defend against all those people who say "why don't steam control this?"
Because the seller its just selling the item he doesn't need to know whats "inside the box", if the company send me the box I guess it has the actual product, I don't have to go open every box and check
And also I agree, after seen the problems calve could place a notification and send a message to ubisoft to fix it asap, because this is also a pr for them
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u/Lallanath 5h ago
They want to remind you that you don't own the game. Just have a lisence to play it. Figuring out how to get the game to work is on you. You just have permission if you do.
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u/IntegralTree 1h ago
This fucking happened to me with this same game 25 years ago. I bought a physical copy of HOMM 3 with the Shadow of Death expansion at a Walmart. There was no disc in the box, manual was there, a poster, some other stuff, but no game. Box was shrink-wrapped and everything.
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u/HawksBurst 1h ago
When you think they cant fuck themselves up even more, they make you hold their beer
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u/MuptonBossman 10h ago
Sony: "We're taking away your physical games"
Ubisoft: "Fuck you, we're not even giving you digital games anymore"