By There’s a lot to get through in this one. Ubisoft is quietly dropping the launcher requirement from one of its Steam Deck games, achievements for a bunch of unannounced PC games just turned up in a leak, and the Mako Frame Generation project picked up a solid stability update. Here’s everything.
Ubisoft is starting to drop the Connect launcher requirement
Ubisoft has started testing a new Ubisoft Connect Services tool on Steam, and the first game to get it is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The idea is simple: you no longer need to install or launch the separate Ubisoft Connect PC launcher just to play. According to Ubisoft’s own Steam news post, the service keeps the features that normally depend on the launcher, including cross-progression, cross-play, player safety, and challenges and rewards, without needing that extra piece of software running in the background.
Ubisoft is calling this “an initial step toward a smoother and more streamlined launch experience on Steam” and says it plans to keep iterating on Connect Services over time. No other games have been confirmed for the change yet, but if this rolls out further it’s a genuinely nice quality-of-life win for the Steam Deck, where every extra launcher and login screen is one more thing getting in the way of just picking up and playing.
A big Steam achievement leak points to AAA games heading to PC
A large batch of achievement lists for unreleased and unannounced PC games has surfaced through Exophase, a third-party achievement-tracking site, and it’s pointing to some genuinely huge titles. Among the games named are Persona 6 and Ace Combat 8, alongside reports of other unannounced projects. None of this is officially confirmed by the publishers involved, and it’s worth treating it as a leak rather than a done deal, but the scale of it has drawn comparisons to past achievement-list leaks that turned out to be accurate.
If games like these do land on Steam, they’ll eventually be worth keeping an eye on for Steam Deck compatibility too. I’ll keep tracking this one as more details get confirmed.
Mako Frame Generation v3.2.1 fixes a launch-breaking bug
The Mako Frame Generation project, which brings Lossless Scaling-style frame generation and scaling to the Steam Deck and desktop Linux, has pushed out version 3.2.1 for both the Decky plugin and the native renderer. The headline fix restores Vulkan presentation-metadata support that had gone missing in the public 3.2.0 build, which was causing certain games to fail to launch entirely, so this is very much worth grabbing if you updated recently and hit that issue.
Beyond that fix, 3.2.1 tightens up frame-pacing consistency and cuts down on unnecessary recovery resets, improves VKD3D-Proton presentation compatibility, and adds proper support for launching MAKO through Lutris via per-game command prefixes. Ubisoft Connect’s own launcher process is now excluded from MAKO’s profile capture so it doesn’t get mistakenly targeted, the FPS cap slider now waits for a brief pause before saving so you don’t get stuck with a temporary low cap, and failed renderer installs will recover your previous files and settings instead of leaving things broken. HDR frame generation and scaling are still being held back until they’ve been validated across more games.
Three good pieces of Steam Deck news in one video: a major launcher heading toward being optional, a leak hinting at some genuinely exciting PC releases, and a meaningful stability update for one of the best community frame generation tools around. I’ll have follow-ups on all three as they develop.