They are making progress by not delaying all of their releases on steam but man that launcher is a nuiscance.
I was too hostile to the company in my last message, honestly I used to enjoy their games. And in general I enjoy the types of games they produce. I'm a sucker for open world stuff but I stopped buying their games when they started trying to emulate the EA strategy of remaking the same game every year and inflating dlc.
I'll happily welcome them back into my library when they drop the launcher component and lean in to steams networking features for easy coop and such.
Just the other day my buddy and I were looking for a coop open world action game with decent combat, he stumbled onto ghost recon wildlands or maybe it was the sequel but either way once we saw it was ubisoft we moved on to look for other title and ended up choosing an entirely different genre despite that being what we were looking for
Eh, they deserve a little hostility.
Last time I fired up a game I owned on steam that required the ubi launcher was a few years ago now and it was really bad then. Like to the point of it automatically creating a new account for me and forcibly linking it to my steam profile despite it not being the account I already had with ubisoft from a registration I had created on an Xbox console previously. It permanently divided my library between multiple ubisoft logins and made accessing the right one really annoying. Their support wouldn't let me refund or even migrate the title to the correct account and they made it an even further inconvenience by not letting me unlink my steam profile from my (wrong) ubisoft profile without writing in a physical letter for some stupid reason. Something to do with purchase history not overlapping with the steam profile or honestly I don't even remember anymore but it was more than enough to no longer want to do business with them.
If it's improved to the point that it's just a pop-up I'd be willing to consider them again. I really don't want to support ubisoft themselves but I'd love to support Prince of Persia games. If any other studio owned the IP I would have bought it on release day